A novel approach for food intake detection using electroglottography

Abstract

Many methods for monitoring diet and food intake rely on subjects self-reporting their daily intake. These methods are subjective, potentially inaccurate and need to be replaced by more accurate and objective methods. This paper presents a novel approach that uses an Electroglottograph (EGG) device for an objective and automatic detection of food intake. Thirty subjects participated in a 4-visit experiment involving the consumption of meals with self-selected content. Variations in the electrical impedance across the larynx caused by the passage of food during swallowing were captured by the EGG device. To compare performance of the proposed method with a well-established acoustical method, a throat microphone was used for monitoring swallowing sounds. Both signals were segmented into non-overlapping epochs of 30 s and processed to extract wavelet features. Subject-independent classifiers were trained using Artificial Neural Networks, to identify periods of food intake from the wavelet features. Results from leave-one-out cross-validation showed an average per-epoch classification accuracy of 90.1% for the EGG-based method and 83.1% for the acoustic-based method, demonstrating the feasibility of using an EGG for food intake detection.

Wearable Food Intake Monitoring Technologies: A Comprehensive Review

“…(a) Acoustic approach: sensor prototype with ear pad cushion (left) with the attachment of the foam cushion to the sensor (right) (adapted from [49]); (b) Visual approach: eButton system with a camera embedded in a button (left) and the smart phone (right) (adaped from [50]); (c) Inertial approach: MEMS gyroscope prototype on the wristband for wrist motion tracking. This self-contained system includes a microprocessor, battery, gyroscope, LCD, memory and USB port connection (adapted from [51]); (d) EMG/EGG-based approach: EGG sensors are attached to a neoprene collar (left) and the collar is fastened to the neck of the subject by the Velcro (right) (adapted from [52]); (e) Piezoelectric approach: piezoelectric film-embedded necklace to detect muscular contractions during swallowing (adapted from [53]); (f) Fusion approach: an example of the vision-acoustic approach -the microphone is embedded in the housing for detecting chewing/eating events and the camera faces toward the food plate for food detection and classification (adapted from [54]); (g) Electrical proximity sensing: the prototype consists of a textile neckband with 4 capacitive sensors for the detection of single swallows [55]; (h) Respiratory inductance plethysmography: the prototype is worn on the chest to collect the breathing signal and and to transfer it to a smart phone through Bluetooth (adapted from [56]). …”

“…Because of the characteristic of contacting with the larynx, EGG has a high potential for wearable food intake monitoring. Farooq et al [52] proposed a testing scheme to evaluate the validity of practicing EGG in food intake detection by setting up the Laryngograph (EGG-D200 from Laryngograph, Ltd., Wallington, U.K. (illustrated in Figure 4d)) around the participant's neck during the experiment. The swallowing frequency signal will then be recorded by two electrodes embedded in the Laryngograph to detect eating events.…”

Mobile Ecological Momentary Diet Assessment Methods for Behavioral Research: Systematic Review (Preprint)

“…image-assisted and image-based assessment [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and the detection of food intake by biomechanical sensors or hand-held devices [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]. Significant progress has been made in image-assisted and image-based food recording that has resulted in the improved accuracy of dietary self-report [15,24].…”

Automatic speech segmentation using throat-acoustic correlation coefficients

“…The throat microphone is widely used for solving the di erent medical monitoring and diagnostic tasks [46,47]. Particularly in the work [46] considered combined use of standard and throat microphones for measurement of acoustic voice parameters and voice categorization.…”

“…The aim of this work was to evaluate the reliability of the measurements of acoustic voice parameters obtained simultaneously using oral and throat microphones and to investigate utility of combined use of these microphones for voice categorization for medical purposes. In other work [47] the novel approach for food intake detection using electroglottography (EGG) was o ered. Variations in the electrical impedance across the larynx caused by the passage of food during swallowing were captured by the EGG device.…”