EVALUATION OF A NUTRITION CARE PLATFORM DEVELOPED FOR THE ROMANIAN DIETITIANS

Background: According to many studies, the management of metabolic disorders requires the following of a healthy lifestyle, which includes dietary intake monitoring. For nutritional analysis, in the United States, USDA recommends software like "SweetWARE" or "MenuSano", but in Romania, there is no official nutritional analysis software yet.
Objective: For this study, we are aiming to evaluate the newly developed web platform called "Nutrition ARTS" (created by George Vrapcea, graduate student at UMPhST from Târgu Mureș), through the feedback and suggestions received from the current users.
Material and methods: A questionnaire was sent via email to the dietitians and the students to become dietitians who have used Nutrition ARTS. Participants completed a questionnaire designed mainly to evaluate the way they appreciated the user experience of the web platform (what benefits they had or what difficulties they encountered) and to suggest new features.
Results: Most respondents felt that they were familiar with the use of the site and gave it an overall 5-star rating, even after a quite short time using it. Some of the most useful features selected were the personalized meal planner and the different types of patient records. The major advantages observed were both the easiness and the short period of time required for creating diets and calculating nutritional needs. One of the main suggestions for future platform development was the ability to save template meal plans that can be adjusted according to the health profile of different patients. Most respondents declared that they did not encounter any difficulties, but some of them had problems with finding certain foods in the database. Everyone stated that they would consider using Nutrition ARTS in their career and recommend it to other dietitians.
Conclusions: Taking into consideration all the feedback and suggestions received through the questionnaire, we can conclude that this web platform had a positive impact on the work of its users and there is a lot of potential for future developments and updates.
Keywords: nutritional analysis, meal planner, patient records, web platform

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