A computer scientist from the University at Buffalo, New York, has come up with a unique way of keepting track of consumed calories. Instead of writing down every single meal you’ve eaten, you just put on a choker-style necklace that can determine your calorie intake based on the sounds you make when you chew!
The wearable tech device, known as AutoDietary, works on the simple idea that different foods make different sounds when chewed. So Wenyao Xu – the brains behind the innovative gadget – is currently creating a library that catalogs the biting, grinding, and swallowing sounds of different types of food. This library will be included in the app that supports the necklace Xu is developing in collaboration with researchers at China’s Northeastern University.
“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 explained. “People either forget or they tend to forget or they want to forget what they eat.” “You can set up a threshold,” he added. “For example, I want to eat 2,000 calories a day. Once you have reached that, the threshold will send you a reminder.
AutoDietary is shaped like a necklace that fits snugly around the neck, allowing a tiny high-fidelity microphone to record sounds made while chewing and swallowing food. The recorded sounds are sent to the smartphone app via bluetooth, where they are compared against the database and identified. In a study conducted by Xu and his team, AutoDietary was able to correctly identify the food and drink consumed by test subjects 85 percent of the time.
