Food intake detection and classification using a necklace-type piezoelectric wearable sensor system

Abstract

Automatic monitoring of food intake in free living conditions is still an open problem to solve. This paper presents a novel necklacetype wearable system embedded with a piezoelectric sensor to monitor ingestive behavior by detecting skin motion from the lower trachea. Detected events are incorporated for food classification. Unlike the previous stateof- the-art piezoelectric sensor based system that employs spectrogram features, we have tried to fully exploit time-domain based signals for optimal features. Through numerous evaluations on the length of a frame, we have found the best performance with a frame length of 70 samples (3.5 seconds). This demonstrates that the chewing sequence carries important information for food classification. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed algorithm for food intake detection and food classification in real-life scenarios. Our system yields an accuracy of 89.2% for food intake detection and 80.3% for food classification over 17 food categories. Additionally, our system is based on a smartphone app, which helps users live healthy by providing them with real-time feedback about their ingested food episodes and types.