AutoDietary: A Wearable Acoustic Sensor System for Food Intake Recognition in Daily Life

Abstract

Nutrition-related diseases are nowadays a main threat to human health and pose great challenges to medical care. A crucial step to solve the problems is to monitor the daily food intake of a person precisely and conveniently. For this purpose, we present AutoDietary, a wearable system to monitor and recognize food intakes in daily life. An embedded hardware prototype is developed to collect food intake sensor data, which is highlighted by a high-fidelity microphone worn on the subject’s neck to precisely record acoustic signals during eating in a noninvasive manner. The acoustic data are preprocessed and then sent to a smartphone via Bluetooth, where food types are recognized. In particular, we use hidden Markov models to identify chewing or swallowing events, which are then processed to extract their time/frequency-domain and nonlinear features. A lightweight decision-tree-based algorithm is adopted to recognize the type of food. We also developed an application on the smartphone, which aggregates the food intake recognition results in a user-friendly way and provides suggestions on healthier eating, such as better eating habits or nutrition balance. Experiments show that the accuracy of food-type recognition by AutoDietary is 84.9%, and those to classify liquid and solid food intakes are up to 97.6% and 99.7%, respectively. To evaluate real-life user experience, we conducted a survey, which collects rating from 53 participants on wear comfort and functionalities of AutoDietary. Results show that the current design is acceptable to most of the users.