Smart-U: Smart Utensils Know what You Eat

Qianyi Huang, Zhice Yang, Qian Zhang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference Proceeding/ReportConference Paper published in a bookpeer-review

30 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Mobile sensing enables unobtrusive monitoring of our daily activities, sleep quality, breathing and heart rate, revolutionizing the health-care system. Dietary information is also a critical dimension for health management but has no convenient solution yet. In this paper, we ask whether we can track meal composition unobtrusively. We introduce Smart-U, a new utensil design that can recognize meal composition during the intake process, without user intervention or on-body instruments. Smart-U makes use of the fact that light spectra reflected by foods are dependent on the food ingredients. By analyzing the reflected light spectra, Smart-U can recognize what food is on top of the utensil. We describe the prototype design of Smart-U and the food recognition algorithm. We demonstrate that Smart-U can recognize 20 types of foods with 93 % accuracy. It can work robustly under different conditions. We envision that Smart-U can enable automatic food intake tracking, and provide personalized food suggestions based on nutrient recommendations and prior consumption. In the long run, Smart-U can contribute to the study of chronic diseases.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationINFOCOM 2018 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1439-1447
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781538641286
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 8 Oct 2018
Event2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2018 - Honolulu, United States
Duration: 15 Apr 201819 Apr 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
Volume2018-April
ISSN (Print)0743-166X

Conference

Conference2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityHonolulu
Period15/04/1819/04/18

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.

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