Automatic Analysis of Food Intake and Meal Microstructure Based on Continuous Weight Measurements

The structure of the cumulative food intake (CFI) curve has been associated with obesity and eating disorders. Scales that record the weight loss of a plate from which a subject eats food are used for capturing this curve; however, their measurements are contaminated by additive noise and are distorted by certain types of artifacts. This paper presents an algorithm for automatically processing continuous in-meal weight measurements in order to extract the clean CFI curve and in-meal eating indicators, such as total food intake and food intake rate. The algorithm relies on the representation of the weight-time series by a string of symbols that correspond to events such as bites or food additions. A context-free grammar is next used to model a meal as a sequence of such events. The selection of the most likely parse tree is finally used to determine the predicted eating sequence. The algorithm is evaluated on a dataset of 113 meals collected using the Mandometer, a scale that continuously samples plate weight during eating. We evaluate the effectiveness for seven indicators and for bite-instance detection. We compare our approach with three state-of-the-art algorithms, and achieve the lowest error rates for most indicators (24 g for total meal weight). The proposed algorithm extracts the parameters of the CFI curve automatically, eliminating the need for manual data processing, and thus facilitating large-scale studies of eating behavior.