Nutritional assessment using a microcomputer. 1. Programme design.

Nutritional assessment is used to determine the nutritional status, metabolic status and nutritional requirements of patients receiving nutritional support. It is also used to identify patients at risk from the effects of malnutrition. Nutritional assessment uses anthropometric and laboratory data and involves reference to standard tables and equations and is therefore time consuming and tedious. When a large battery of tests is used, consistent interpretation of the results is difficult. This paper describes the design of a computer program which computes nutritional and metabolic status of patients and prescribes the nitrogen and calorie requirements.