NeckSense: A Multi-Sensor Necklace for Detecting Eating Activities in Free-Living Conditions
Shibo Zhang, Yuqi Zhao, Dzung Tri Nguyen, Runsheng Xu, Sougata Sen,, Josiah Hester, Nabil Alshurafa

TL;DR
NeckSense is a low-power multi-sensor necklace that unobtrusively detects eating activities in natural settings, achieving over 80% F1-score in identifying eating episodes across entire waking days.
Contribution
This work introduces a novel multi-sensor necklace device capable of accurately detecting eating activities in free-living conditions, with extended battery life for continuous monitoring.
Findings
Achieved 81.6% F1-score in detecting eating episodes in naturalistic settings.
Demonstrated reliable detection over more than 15.8 hours of battery life.
Effective in both obese and non-obese participants across two studies.
Abstract
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a multi-sensor low-power necklace 'NeckSense' for automatically and unobtrusively capturing fine-grained information about an individual's eating activity and eating episodes, across an entire waking-day in a naturalistic setting. The NeckSense fuses and classifies the proximity of the necklace from the chin, the ambient light, the Lean Forward Angle, and the energy signals to determine chewing sequences, a building block of the eating activity. It then clusters the identified chewing sequences to determine eating episodes. We tested NeckSense with 11 obese and 9 non-obese participants across two studies, where we collected more than 470 hours of data in naturalistic setting. Our result demonstrates that NeckSense enables reliable eating-detection for an entire waking-day, even in free-living environments. Overall, our system…
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Taxonomy
TopicsEating Disorders and Behaviors · Nutritional Studies and Diet · Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
