Experiences in Building a Real-World Eating Recogniser

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the progressive design of the gesture recognition module of an automated food journaling system -- Annapurna. Annapurna runs on a smartwatch and utilises data from the inertial sensors to first identify eating gestures, and then captures food images which are presented to the user in the form of a food journal. We detail the lessons we learnt from multiple in-the-wild studies, and show how eating recognizer is refined to tackle challenges such as (i) high gestural diversity, and (ii) non-eating activities with similar gestural signatures. Annapurna is finally robust (identifying eating across a wide diversity in food content, eating styles and environments) and accurate (false-positive and false-negative rates of 6.5% and 3.3% respectively)