Dr. Iñaki Elío talks about the prototype of the European project Dieting_Lab led by UNEATLANTICO.

Iñaki Elío, Dr. in Health and Nutrition Projects and academic director of the degree in Human Nutrition and Dietetics, explains the progress of the prototype carried out for the European project Dieting_Lab led by the European University of the Atlantic and in which a group of European universities collaborate such as; the University of Valladolid, the St. Pölten University, the University of Porto, the AP Hogeschool Antwerpen and the Jan Kochanowski University.

Among the actions of this project is the design of an avatar so that students in the area of nutrition and dietetics can put their theoretical knowledge into practice in a safe environment, and then move on to the second part in which they can interact with a real patient through a virtual platform with the supervision of an expert.

So far, six meetings have been held in which various practical cases have been defined and the characteristics that must be taken into account in order for the students to be able to obtain a diagnosis. “The data will always be clinical, nutritional records, biochemical and anthropometric results so that students can finally draw their conclusions and can guide the diagnosis of the patient so that, from there, they can establish a nutritional action,” said Dr. Elío.

In this sense, this case has already been done and the team has had to transform it to make a type of script that has a logic over time, simulating a real query. The aim of this is to transfer it to a bot that has

to be fed, so we have to make a script that will be transferred to tables in which we will decide what the question will be, the answer and link it to feed the bot so that when it receives a question it relates it to an answer that it automates.

In this way, through the information development part, the type of programme and bot is already defined so that it can manage all the interaction with the student and the virtual patient. “From there, different layers can be added, which will be done in a later process, the important thing is to have a bot with the capacity to understand questions and provide answers. This is a part that is very advanced in the project, and we already have practically a case that we are adapting so that it can work”, explained Iñaki Elío.