Monitoring eating habits using a piezoelectric sensor-based necklace

Maintaining appropriate levels of food intake and developing regularity in eating habits is crucial to weight loss and the preservation of a healthy lifestyle. Moreover, awareness of eating habits is an important step towards portion control and weight loss. In this paper, we introduce a novel food-intake monitoring system based around a wearable wireless-enabled necklace. The proposed necklace includes an embedded piezoelectric sensor, small Arduino-compatible microcontroller, Bluetooth LE transceiver, and Lithium-Polymer battery. Motion in the throat is captured and transmitted to a mobile application for processing and user guidance. Results from data collected from 30 subjects indicate that it is possible to detect solid and liquid foods, with an F-measure of 0.837 and 0.864, respectively, using a naive Bayes classifier. Furthermore, identification of extraneous motions such as head turns and walking are shown to significantly reduce the false positive rate of swallow detection.