The magnitude of the daily explosion of high volumes of data has led to the emergence of the Big Data paradigm. The ever-increasing amount of information available on the Internet makes it increasingly difficult for individuals to find what they need quickly and easily. Recommendation systems have appeared as a solution to overcome this problem. Collaborative filtering is widely used in this type of systems, but high dimensions and data sparsity are always a main problem. With the idea of deep learning gaining more importance, several works have emerged to improve this type of filtering. In this article, a product recommendation system is proposed where an autoencoder based on a collaborative filtering method is employed. A comparison of this model with the Singular Value Decomposition is made and presented in the results section. Our experiment shows a very low Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) value, considering that the recommendations presented to the users are in line with their interests and are not affected by the data sparsity problem as the datasets are very sparse, 0.996. The results are quite promising achieving an RMSE value of 0.029 in the first dataset and 0.010 in the second one.

In the healthcare industry, the patient's nutrition is a key factor in their treatment process. Every user has their own specific nutritional needs and requirements. An appropriate nutrition policy can therefore help the patient's recovery process and alleviate possible symptoms. Food recommender systems are platforms that offer personalised suggestions of recipes to users. However, there is a lack of usage of recipe recommendation systems in the healthcare sector. Multiple challenges in representing the domain of food and the patient's needs make it complicated to implement these systems. The present project aims to develop a platform for an intelligent planning of the user's meals, based on their clinical conditions. The application of machine learning algorithms on nutrition, in healthcare services and continuous care is thus a key topic of research. This platform will be tested and deployed at the Social Cafeteria of Vila Verde (Cantina Social da Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Vila Verde). The development of this project will use the Design Science Research (DSR) investigation methodology, ensuring that the solution to the problem accomplishes all needs and requirements of the professionals, while elucidating new knowledge both for the institution and the scientific community.