Promoting Healthy Eating Habits via Intelligent Virtual Assistants, Improving Monitoring by Nutritional Specialists: State of the Art

The current panorama of virtual nutrition assistants with artificial intelligence (AI) stands out in their ability to promote healthy eating habits and improve the monitoring of patients with this type of condition. These systems are characterized, on the one hand, by the capacity for personalization, conversational interaction and continuous feedback from users, which facilitates the adoption of healthy behaviors. On the other hand, taking advantage of the data that this individualized user support can provide, it will in turn allow for supporting databases for useful processing of these for the benefit of the specialists who assist them nutritionally. This research presents a comprehensive review of the state of the art, summarizing the main findings on the use of virtual nutrition assistants to promote healthy eating habits and those that allow optimizing patient monitoring by applying artificial intelligence to achieve this. It was carried out using a Systematic Literature Review (PRISMA-ScR) methodology through a rigorous and systematic collection of relevant information, finding that virtual nutrition assistants promote healthy eating habits and optimize patient follow-up, in addition that they offer personalization, conversational interaction and continuous feedback, thereby facilitating the adoption of healthy behaviors.