Engineers make a gadget that recognizes food by sound

Engineers at the University of New York at Buffalo are trying to create a gadget called AutoDietary, which, being fixed on the neck, will be able to recognize food absorbed by a person by the sound with which they chew and swallow it.

Fitness trackers trying to measure the calories spent by a person are now a dime a dozen . But the reverse process, the calculation of calories absorbed by a person, is difficult. The maximum that gadgets are capable of is to provide access to the database of products, and scan the barcodes of packages for quick recognition of the type of food.

Programmers from Buffalo, with a desire for automation inherent in their profession, decided to take a different approach to the problem and try to teach the gadget to automatically detect food. In their opinion, the difference in the structure of various products may well help to distinguish them by the sound of chewing.



At the moment, engineers are compiling a database of sounds for various products (and compiling databases has never been so tasty), which will be included in the software library for AutoDietary.

As planned, the gadget is fixed on the neck, and a sensitive microphone picks up the sounds of the jaws, and then sends them via bluetooth to a smartphone, the software of which recognizes food types.

In preliminary tests, in which 12 people participated, chewing six types of food (apples, carrots, chips, cookies, peanuts and walnuts), the percentage of successful recognition of the type of food by the device was around 85.

To deal with the obvious limitations of the device (how it recognizes soup or other complex dishes?), the developers plan to supplement it with a biomonitoring system in the future. They hope that by collecting information on blood sugar and other data, the system will be able to better recognize food types and give tips on improving nutrition.