Doing the job that would cause a fight with a significant others and family members, a new piece of wearable tech is being tuned to tell people when it's time to stop consuming calories. The device will listen to what the wearer eats, determine how healthy the food is and then gently texts that individual to let them know it's time to switch from carrot cake to just carrots.
Researchers at the University of Buffalo have been developing the device they call AutoDietary. The wearable tech's sensor is about the size of a zipper pull and is connected to a band that wraps around the user's neck like a choker.
AutoDietary's sensor rests at the back of the wearer's neck, listening for what the mouth chomps and the throat takes in and reporting its findings back to the user's smartphone via Bluetooth.
AutoDietary will leverage a library of audio samples that'll help it determine what a user is masticating.
"Each food, as it's chewed, has its own voice," says Wenyao Xu, assistant professor of computer science at the University at Buffalo's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
AutoDietary was tested on a small group of 12 individuals, ranging from ages 12 to 49, who were given water, apples, carrots, cookies, chips, peanuts and walnuts. The study found AutoDietary to be about 85 percent accurate.
The researchers are still compiling AutoDietary's library of samples and working to improve the device's ability to recognize the different kinds of food people are consuming.
Xu and his team are also working on a biomonitoring device to compliment AutoDietary, as determining caloric intake based solely on sound isn't even close to an airtight approach. Some types of food are too complex to suss out their substance via sounds, while others sound too much alike.
It's a solution that approaches a problem from the opposite end, counting calories consumed instead of calories burned. Taking AutoDietary's approach, consumers are overwhelmed by data, Xu says.
"There is no shortage of wearable devices that tell us how many calories we burn, but creating a device that reliably measures caloric intake isn't so easy," Xu says.
