Your Glasses Know Your Diet: Dietary Monitoring Using Electromyography Sensors

Dietary monitoring can provide valuable information for disease diagnosis, body weight control, and dietary habit management, and thus it is welcomed by patients, dieters, and nutritionists. While various techniques have been used for dietary monitoring in clinical trials and user studies, they are not ready for daily use. Existing solutions either require tedious manual recording or may impede normal daily activities. In this paper, a pair of diet-aware glasses is designed. The key idea here is that when people wear glasses, the temples of the glasses are in touch with the lower part of the temporalis muscle, one of the mastication muscles. By integrating an electromyography (EMG) sensor into glasses, the glasses can measure the muscle activity of the temporalis to detect intake-related events. This paper instantiates the idea by building a prototype equipped with an EMG sensor, a microcontroller, SD shield/card and a Bluetooth radio. When working together with a smartphone, the glasses can provide detailed information on intake schedule, the number of chewing cycles and broad food category. Extensive experiments are conducted on seven subjects and the results show appealing prospects for our diet-aware glasses. The prototype achieves 96% accuracy for counting the number of chewing cycles and up to 90.8% accuracy for classifying five types of food.