Dietary Supplements Mobile Application with Expert System and Text Mining

The consumption of dietary supplements has started to become a common habit for Malaysians. People consume dietary supplements to improve their health, prevent or cure diseases, or overcome nutrient deficiency. Despite the benefits of dietary supplements, they could carry various risks. Besides that, selecting dietary supplements could be a challenging process as it needs to tailor the consumer’s dietary profile and health condition. To solve these problems, a system has been proposed to provide various information about the ingredients detected in the dietary supplements’ descriptions. It also provides recommendation functions based on the user’s health condition and dietary profile. Furthermore, it helps to perform diagnosis when the user suffers adverse effects after consuming a dietary supplement. To accomplish these functions, the system utilized text mining techniques like named entity recognition for extracting ingredient names from the description of dietary supplements. Meanwhile, expert system techniques like forward chaining and backward chaining were also implemented for the recommendation and diagnosis function. The system aims to act as an assistive tool that helps the user detect unaware risks in the dietary supplements and assist the user in selecting dietary supplements that best suit their health condition.