A personal assistive system for nutrient intake monitoring

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, Obesity has reached epidemic proportions, with over than 1.5 billion adults suffering from overweight in 2008. As Obesity and overweight are major risks to human health, obesity treatment has been the focus of a large number of recent studies. Obesity treatment requires constant monitoring of the patient's diet. The smart technologies of today's intelligent environment can be used towards development of such monitoring system for obesity treatment. In this article we will propose a smart system that takes advantage of smartphones to build a platform for the monitoring of the amount of calorie intake for obesity patients. The patient uses the built-in camera of the smartphone to take a picture of any food that he/she wants to eat. The system will then process the images to detect the type of food and portion size, and uses the information to estimate the amount of calories.