PART THREE_SOLUTIONS the other relating to the service requirements of different local contexts.These characteristics together enable us to pinpoint needs to be met when planning Punto X, a solution system that seeks to respond efficiently to problems which up to now have been answered by a complex set of heterogeneous services and varying attitudes. These problems, and therefore the benefits to be offered to users, are linked to demands for: - knowledge about healthy eating habits - suitable foods for specific pathologies (e.g. diabetes, hypertension) - suitable food for special physiological states (e.g. the elderly, expectant mothers, children, sportsmen) - food for particular dietary choices (such as vegetarians, macrobiotics, people on a diet) - fresh, traditional food These requirements are in turn associated with situations of: - reduced choice, - reduced autonomy, and - reduced physical mobility 86 / 87
Solutions offered by Punto X responds to these demands through an intrinsically sustainable (because entirely organic) agro-industrial food chain, associated with personalised consumer dietary planning. This has the dual advantage of reacting to precise demands for individual health and of increasing knowledge, and consequently the ability to choose, through an indirect form of education. The solutions also set out to meet these demands specifically, on an advanced industrial scale, limiting economic and environmental costs. It does this through the introduction of personalisation criteria that are based on more generalisable and extendible principles (the concept of context-of-use) than the more traditional one-to-one, and by making use of a modular system architecture of the components. The strategy of contextualisation The personalisation of solutions offered is achieved thanks to flexibility in meal composition, the organisation of distribution
DS Medica deals with the designing, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of software and hardware of medical technologies for diagnostic and treatment purposes in the following branches of medicine: clinical nutrition, gastroenterology, dermatology, oncology, angiology and rheumatology. The company runs several important networks for family doctors, dieticians and gynaecologists, by computerizing their office management activities. Through this research project the company wanted to understand how such professional knowledge could be made better available to the final user in terms of empowering food competences in daily food management.