A novel approach for chewing detection based on a wearable PPG sensor

Monitoring of human eating behaviour has been attracting interest over the last few years, as a means to a healthy lifestyle, but also due to its association with serious health conditions, such as eating disorders and obesity. Use of self-reports and other non-automated means of monitoring have been found to be unreliable, compared to the use of wearable sensors. Various modalities have been reported, such as acoustic signal from ear-worn microphones, or signal from wearable strain sensors. In this work, we introduce a new sensor for the task of chewing detection, based on a novel photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor placed on the outer earlobe to perform the task. We also present a processing pipeline that includes two chewing detection algorithms from literature and one new algorithm, to process the captured PPG signal, and present their effectiveness. Experiments are performed on an annotated dataset recorded from 21 individuals, including more than 10 hours of eating and non-eating activities. Results show that the PPG sensor can be successfully used to support dietary monitoring.