India’s quest for living a disease-free and super-productive life has been focused on preventive personal healthcare with a renewed thrust on identifying and implementing a set of dietary and habitual changes that work best for a person. In Ayurveda, this set of characteristics is known as prakriti or the characteristic personality of an individual.
To make the process easier, researchers at Punjab-based Lovely Professional University (LPU) have developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled smart system which predicts and recommends dietary changes to balance tridoshic constitutions or prakriti of a person as per Ayurvedic practice.
Tridosha, the combination of three doshas – Vata, Pitta, and Kapha, determine the prakriti. An individual’s health and diseases, and cure for any disease etc are governed by these three doshas.
The determination of a person’s prakriti or psychosomatic constitution can help them in the implementation of ways for not only personalised medicine and treatment but also personalised prevention, according to the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine.
It provides probable occurrence of qualitative and quantitative imbalances in the body and helps in planning lifestyle and diet according to the body’s needs, write researchers Vishu Madaan and Anjali Goel in a paper published in IEEE Xplore.
So far, the most popular method, particularly in the western world, to identify prakriti is through genetic testing. However, LPU’s tool determines it by assessing various physical and mental traits through a questionnaire and AI-based technology.
Once determined, the system gives recommendations to adapt changes in diet and lifestyle depending on predicted dosha, as per the LPU researchers.
It took five years for the researchers to complete a prototype tool for predicting prakritis.
“Our system is capable of predicting prakriti by capturing the physical features of humans. This research work helps any individual to follow the healthy lifestyle routine based on one’s prakriti,” said Dr Prateek Agrawal, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the School of Computer Science Engineering at LPU.
According to the US government’s National Centre for Biotechnology Information, determination of prakritis in the early stage of childhood enables parents to prevent various chronic diseases through the implementation of various dietary, lifestyle, and habitual changes, as required, resulting in such children leading healthy, disease-free, and more productive lives.
“This work is unique of its kind which predicts the Ayurveda-based human body tridosha using AI and machine learning. It analyses the real-time captured images of any individual, asks a few basic questions and recommends which tridosha is applicable to the person. Accordingly, the recommendations on the everyday life routine are given for healthy life,” Dr Agrawal said.