Detection and Characterization of Food Intake by Wearable Sensors

Abstract

Food intake provides energy and nutrients to sustain human life. Studying the ingestive behavior of individuals is of particular interest in understanding and treatment of medical conditions strongly associated with food intakes, such as obesity and eating disorders. Traditionally, ingestive behavior in humans has been assessed through self-monitoring of food intake. However, this approach is inaccurate, time-consuming, and suffers from the observation and misreporting effects. Wearable sensors present a compelling alternative to overcome the limitations of self-reporting methods. These sensors can potentially provide more objective measurements of food intake by monitoring physiological processes related to one or more stages of the food consumption process: hand-to-mouth gestures, bites, chewing, or swallowing. Specialized signal processing and pattern recognition methodologies use the sensor data to automatically detect and characterize each intake episode. This chapter presents a review of the state of the art of wearable sensors and methodologies proposed for monitoring ingestive behavior in humans.