Wearable Food Intake Monitoring Technologies: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Wearable devices monitoring food intake through passive sensing is slowly emerging to complement self-reporting of users' caloric intake and eating behaviors. Though the ultimate goal for the passive sensing of eating is to become a reliable gold standard in dietary assessment, it is currently showing promise as a means of validating self-report measures. Continuous food-intake monitoring allows for the validation and refusal of users' reported data in order to obtain more reliable user information, resulting in more effective health intervention services. Recognizing the importance and strength of wearable sensors in food intake monitoring, there has been a variety of approaches proposed and studied in recent years. While existing technologies show promise, many challenges and opportunities discussed in this survey, still remain. This paper presents a meticulous review of the latest sensing platforms and data analytic approaches to solve the challenges of food-intake monitoring, ranging from ear-based chewing and swallowing detection systems that capture eating gestures to wearable cameras that identify food types and caloric content through image processing techniques. This paper focuses on the comparison of different technologies and approaches that relate to user comfort, body location, and applications for medical research. We identify and summarize the forthcoming opportunities and challenges in wearable food intake monitoring technologies.

EarBit

“…Devices ranging from a microphone on the neck [38] to EMG-measuring eyeglasses [40] to in-ear microphones [16] have been explored. Since an important first step in research is to achieve reasonable lab-controlled performance, most work so far has thus occurred in laboratory settings with reasonable results [3, 17, 36]. In the real world, however, eating is often accompanied by and occasionally occurs simultaneously with other activities, such as speaking and walking, and such behavior is rarely captured in laboratory settings.…”

A review on intelligent wearables: Uses and risks

“…Diet control is another way of weight management. Previous studies compared and confirmed the effectiveness of wearable devices in monitoring people's dietary behaviors (Heydarian, Adam, Burrows, Collins, & Rollo, 2019;Schiboni & Amft, 2018;Vu et al, 2017).…”

Automatic, wearable-based, in-field eating detection approaches for public health research: a scoping review

“…Detecting and monitoring human eating behavior in the realworld is a growing field and offers exciting and novel opportunities for future public health research. Previous literature reviews on automatic eating detection methods have often placed a focus on sensor modalities and technologies in any research setting 28 , on specific sensor modalities, such as wearable video cameras 65 , or on specific sensor locations, such as the upper limb 29 . No review to date has focused specifically on studies that use wearable devices to automatically detect eating activity in naturalistic settings.…”

“…In the past decade, a range of wearable sensors for the purpose of automating eating detection have been proposed and studied. However, these studies have been primarily conducted in a combination of controlled lab and semi-controlled field settings 28,29 , and for good reason: these systems are challenging to develop, deploy, and evaluate. More recently, however, the research field has rapidly expanded the testing of these devices in the field.…”