A probabilistic context free grammar for food intake

Abstract

The invention discloses a probabilistic context free grammar for food intake. The invention regards monitoring and modification of eating behavior through continuous meal weight measurements, and hasbeen successfully applied in clinical practice to treat obesity and eating disorders. For this purpose, the Mandometer R trademark, 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 intakecurve using only the Mandometer R trademark 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 sufferingfrom obesity or eating disorders, as well as from individuals with normal BMI, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to an apparatus comprising a scale connected to a computer device which displays and plots on a screen a food intake curve of measured meals eaten by a person from cutlery placed on the scale which will eat Parameters are passed to the computer device, and its methods are involved. Background technique [0002] Monitoring and modifying eating behavior through continuous measurement of meal weight has been successfully used clinically to treat obesity and eating disorders. For this purpose, during a single meal, a and video recordings of subjects to assist clinicians in measuring relevant food intake parameters. [0003] Obesity (OB) and eating disorders (ED), including anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa, affect a large portion of the modern population today. According to the World Health Organization, more than 500 million people lived with OB in 2008 1 . The situation is not expected to improve over the next ...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0006] but, The processing of records is not a simple task

Typically, clinicians who process records to create FI curves rely heavily on empirical rules and some guesswork, introducing error in interpretation

On the other hand, additional video recording can be used to assist the clinician, but this process is very laborious and requires additional work (e.g. synchronization, etc.)

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