A parametric Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar for food intake analysis based on continuous meal weight measurements

• Published in: 2015 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2015; pp. 7853 - 7856
• Main Authors: Papapanagiotou, Vasileios, Diou, Christos, Langlet, Billy, Ioakimidis, Ioannis, Delopoulos, Anastasios
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.08.2015
• Subjects: Accuracy; Adult; Algorithms; Anorexia - diet therapy; Anorexia - psychology; Body Mass Index; Eating; Feeding Behavior; Female; Food Analysis - methods; Humans; Male; Meals; Models, Statistical; Obesity; Obesity - diet therapy; Obesity - psychology; Probabilistic logic; Registers; Smoothing methods; Weight measurement
• ISSN: 1094-687X; 1557-170X
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2015.7320212

Monitoring and modification of eating behaviour through continuous meal weight measurements has been successfully applied in clinical practice to treat obesity and eating disorders. For this purpose, the Mandometer, a plate scale, along with video recordings of subjects during the course of single meals, has been used to assist clinicians in measuring relevant food intake parameters. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for automatically constructing a subject's food intake curve using only the Mandometer weight measurements. This eliminates the need for direct clinical observation or video recordings, thus significantly reducing the manual effort required for analysis. The proposed algorithm aims at identifying specific meal related events (e.g. bites, food additions, artifacts), by applying an adaptive pre-processing stage using Delta coefficients, followed by event detection based on a parametric Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar on the derivative of the recorded sequence. Experimental results on a dataset of 114 meals from individuals suffering from obesity or eating disorders, as well as from individuals with normal BMI, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.