A Mobile-Based Diet Monitoring System for Obesity Management

Abstract

Personal diet management is key to fighting the obesity epidemic. Recent advances in smartphones and wearable sensor technologies have empowered automated food monitoring through food image processing and eating episode detection, with the goal to conquer drawbacks of traditional food journaling that is labour intensive, inaccurate, and low adherent. In this paper, we present a new interactive mobile system that enables automated food recognition and assessment based on user food images and provides dietary intervention while tracking users’ dietary and physical activities. In addition to using techniques in computer vision and machine learning, one unique feature of this system is the realization of real-time energy balance monitoring through metabolic network simulation. As a proof of concept, we have demonstrated the use of this system through an Android application.