iEat: automatic wearable dietary monitoring with bio-impedance sensing

Diet is an inseparable part of good health, from maintaining a healthy lifestyle for the general population to supporting the treatment of patients suffering from specific diseases. Therefore it is of great significance to be able to monitor people's dietary activity in their daily life remotely. While the traditional practices of self-reporting and retrospective analysis are often unreliable and prone to errors; sensor-based remote diet monitoring is therefore an appealing approach. In this work, we explore an atypical use of bio-impedance by leveraging its unique temporal signal patterns, which are caused by the dynamic close-loop circuit variation between a pair of electrodes due to the body-food interactions during dining activities. Specifically, we introduce iEat, a wearable impedance-sensing device for automatic dietary activity monitoring without the need for external instrumented devices such as smart utensils. By deploying a single impedance sensing channel with one electrode on each wrist, iEat can recognize food intake activities (e.g., cutting, putting food in the mouth with or without utensils, drinking, etc.) and food types from a defined category. The principle is that, at idle, iEat measures only the normal body impedance between the wrist-worn electrodes; while the subject is doing the food-intake activities, new paralleled circuits will be formed through the hand, mouth, utensils, and food, leading to consequential impedance variation. To quantitatively evaluate iEat in real-life settings, a food intake experiment was conducted in an everyday table-dining environment, including 40 meals performed by ten volunteers. With a lightweight, user-independent neural network model, iEat could detect four food intake-related activities with a macro F1 score of 86.4% and classify seven types of foods with a macro F1 score of 64.2%.