Computer tailoring is a state of the art health education technique that has become increasingly popular in the past decade. This tailored technique has even been shown to be more effective than the non-tailored counterpart. Tailoring is defined as any combination of information or change strategies intended to reach one specific person. This is based on characteristics that are unique to that person and have been derived from an individual assessment. The definition of computer tailoring, adapted from “Past, present, and future of computer-tailored nutrition education”, by Johannes Brug, Anke Oenama, and Marci Campbell, is the use of an expert system that creates “if-then” statements translated from the nutritional and educational expertise of a nutrition professional or panel of nutrition experts. This method allows the health professional to document their diagnostic and educational expertise in a computerized expert system. Fat reduction was one of the goals that was greatly improved when using computer-tailored nutrition education compared to a traditional nutritional education. One trial in the Netherlands resulted in a 5.4% fat reduction when computer-tailored education was used, compared to 1.4% using a general nutrition information control group.
The most surprising part of this article was that the authors concluded that computer-tailored nutrition education was more effective in terms of fat reduction when compared to general nutrition information. Most nutrition courses do not touch upon the aspect of computer-tailored health education, and they stress the importance of a face-to-face interview followed by a diagnosis that the registered dietitian would come up with. However, based on this article, this technique may be outdated, and if computer-tailored education merged with the traditional aspect, an even better education tool may be created.
The most interesting aspect of this article is the creation of the “if-then” statements that the computer creates. Some skepticism arose as I read this article, I was wondering if the program could create a correct diagnosis based on the interview conducted by the nutrition professional. In higher-level nutrition courses, students are taught to make their own diagnoses through assessment, biochemical values, clinical records, and diet intake. If a program could take all of that data and notice a rise in a certain biomarker and create a diagnosis based on that one piece of data would be astonishing. I would like to see the correct diagnosis rate of this program to remove the skepticism that I had while reading this article.
Computer-tailored nutrition education is the future of diagnosis. As a nutrition educator, this tool would be extremely useful. The ability to document an interview with a patient and go back to something they said in case you forgot it would be handy. Also, the computer system may catch something that the nutrition educator missed, and form the correct diagnosis. I think that this program will be seen a little skeptically at first, maybe used as a backup reference that the dietitian can use, but in a few years I think this tool will become increasingly used in the healthcare world. Incorrect diagnoses are still a problem in the modern world, but in the future computer-tailored nutrition education could change that and correct the diagnosis of a patient.