For the people who are curious, and want to monitor their diet more accurately, a new technology in on the ground which has became a real companion for them.
To keep track of the diet that you have taken is not comfortable in a normal routine of a person. Many fitness tracking apps demands such a track of diet and the components that you've taken in diet because they couldn't have an accurate answer of how healthy and quantity of a food is.
According to Edward Sazonov, a professor at the University of Alabama, the major problem is the self-reporting for such persons who want to monitor their diet very accurately. Edward Sazonov is currently working on such a device that can help the people to get rid off from such a task for their health.
To enhance the comfortableness for people with such a problem, 'Automatic Ingestion Monitor (AIM)' is introduced. The device is like a Bluetooth earpiece that can be easily worn around the ear. The device consists of a camera and a motion sensor.
The camera identifies what you eat or drink where as the motion sensor, stuck to your jaw, under the earlobe, senses the movement. The motion sensor is intelligent enough that it can only enroll only the chewing and swallowing whereas pass off the movements of talking. Besides that, it can also tell tell the difference between talking and eating based on the difference in the movements of jaws. The device, on the basis of the data collected from the camera and the motion sensor, calculates the total contents of mass and thus the energy.
Sazonov said that the number of chews is proportional to ingested mass and energy intake.
By now, the image from the camera is analyzed by a nutritionist who identifies the food and estimates the portion size, but Edward Sazonov hopes to make this process automated by the help of a computer that can calculate the portion size using a 3D analysis of the images.
The prototype works as yet and Sazonov is working on making it more comfortable model for more testing.
Besides AIM, there are some other high-tech trackers, including a pin-on button called eButton. Such trackers analyse 3D images and estimate the volume of food that people consume. But Sazonov dreams much more than that. Sazonov desires to replace the unreliable self-reported data that many doctors rely on. He also hopes that this project will lead to new weight-loss strategies and help researchers learn more about eating behaviors and eating disorders.
AIM will likely be marketed as a medical device but with the passage of time, it would become a consumer product for such people who want to track their diet with more accuracy.
Amy Subar, a research nutritionist, criticize the use of trackers like AIM or eButton. He said that such technologies could introduce a line break in the data because with such a wearable device, people know that their food is being monitored and it's like that awareness will influence what they choose to eat that day. He also added that there might be some mistake on calculating the contents of mass and energy in the food that a person intake if the image quality is not good due to the presence of person in a darker place like a bar. Subar added that a picture may show that a person is eating a sandwich, but it's impossible to tell what's in the sandwich,
Summing up the pros and cons of the new technologies like AIM, Subar said that although such technology helps in automated diet analysis, but there are still many problems that should be solved.
Interesting....
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