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The elderly population in Thailand has tended to increase at a high rate, and the National Statistical Office of Thailand has indicated that Thailand has been classified as an aging society since 2005 (National Statistical Office, 2017). For Thailand, the Elderly Act 2003 stipulates that the elderly refers to “persons over sixty years of age and over and that have a Thai nationality.” Thailand has entered the aging society because 17.1 percent of the population is aged 60 years and over (Office of the Civil Service Commission (OCSC), 2017).
The trend of the aging group, which is steadily increasing, has led to risks and health problems, especially chronic diseases. The elderly that receives the proper food and an adequate diet can result in good health or delays in the development of chronic aseptic diseases. Ninety-five percent of the elderly have chronic disease problems, consisting for example of high blood pressure, osteoarthritis, cataracts, high cholesterol, diabetes, dementia, cardiovascular disease, depression, stroke, and emphysema. The main factor in these diseases is dietary behavior. If the elderly consume healthy foods, this can help reduce the risk of chronic disease (Ministry of Public Health, 2017).
As the World Health Organization (WHO) has indicated, many diseases that occur in the elderly are a result of dietary factors (World Health Organization, 2010). Vegetarian food, which consists mainly of fruits and vegetables, can help reduce the risk of chronic disease (Mehta, 2017). Vegetarian dietary patterns are known to reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality and the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD) by 40% (Kahleova et al., 2018). Therefore, daily food intake is imperative for the elderly to meet the nutritional needs of the increasingly elderly population. Knowledge management (KM) is a popular concept in the organizational realm. The KM system is one tool that can help to manage an organization's knowledge through a systematically defined process in order to acquire knowledge and understanding. KM can be applied to the elderly in terms of self-care as well as to the consumption of food that is suitable for them (Haque & Kohda 2018).
Machine learning (ML) is currently used extensively in food research, including food classification, food recognition, and food assessment. ML architecture is used to recognize food images in order to inform and to evaluate food for Parkinson's disease patients (Mezgec & Seljak, 2017). A web-based decision support system can suggest diet plans based upon daily calorie needs and activity levels by using ML (Mohemad et al., 2018). ML is used to assess the food energy from the eating images captured on a mobile phone (Fang et al., 2019). Sak and Suchodolska (2020) discusses artificial intelligence in nutrient science research and suggests that AI systems used to assess food may provide personalized nutrition, which is essential in certain diseases and can affect consumer health. Lu (2020) has studied an artificial intelligence-based technique for assessing the nutritional quality of hospitalized patients instead nutritionists. An artificial intelligence system can also be applied for evaluating patient food. Machine learning allows computers to mimic and adapt human-like behavior by combining statistics, data analysis, and machine learning, as well as related methods in order to understand and analyze the actual data (Alzubi et al., 2018).