Food Intake Detection from Inertial Sensors Using LSTM Networks

Unobtrusive analysis of eating behavior based on Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors (e.g. accelerometer) is a topic that has attracted the interest of both the industry and the research community over the past years. This work presents a method for detecting food intake moments that occur during a meal session using the accelerometer and gyroscope signals of an off-the-shelf smartwatch. We propose a two step approach. First, we model the hand micro-movements that take place while eating using an array of binary Support Vector Machines (SVMs); then the detection of intake moments is achieved by processing the sequence of SVM score vectors by a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network. Evaluation is performed on a publicly available dataset with 10 subjects, where the proposed method outperforms similar approaches by achieving an F1 score of 0.892.