FoodWatch

Eating is essential to human life, but overeating relative to need is not. Unfortunately, once bad eating habits are formed, they become challenging to overcome. People overeat for many reasons, such as loss of control, impulsivity due to cues, or heightened emotional state as a result of stress or negative affect, or even positive affect. Being able to passively detect overeating in real time will enable researchers to understand the antecedents and causes of overeating.

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However, much of the eating episodes involve participants sitting and continuously eating, uninterrupted by the realities of daily life. While existing systems prove to work well in lab settings, they are unable to consistently and accurately detect short eating episodes, let alone characterize them with accurate counts of feeding gestures. We further expand on these efforts by analyzing more realistic eating episodes, where participants make phone calls, walk around to answer the door, type on their laptops, and converse with people in a room.

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