WiEat: Fine-grained Device-free Eating Monitoring Leveraging Wi-Fi Signals

Abstract: Eating is a fundamental activity in people's daily life. Studies have shown that many health-related problems such as obesity, diabetes and anemia are closely associated with people's unhealthy eating habits (e.g., skipping meals, eating irregularly and overeating). Traditional eating monitoring solutions relying on self-reports remain an onerous task, while the recent trend requiring users to wear expensive dedicated hardware is still invasive. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we develop a device-free eating monitoring system using WiFi-enabled devices (e.g., smartphone or laptop). Our system aims to automatically monitor users' eating activities through identifying the fine-grained eating motions and detecting the chewing and swallowing. In particular, our system extracts the fine-grained Channel State Information (CSI) from WiFi signals to distinguish eating from non-eating activities and further recognizing users' detailed eating motions with different utensils (e.g., using a folk, knife, spoon or bare hands). Moreover, the system has the capability of identifying chewing and swallowing through detecting users' minute facial muscle movements based on the derived CSI spectrogram. Such fine-grained eating monitoring results are beneficial to the understanding of the user's eating behaviors and can be used to estimate food intake types and amounts. Extensive experiments with 20 users over 1600-minute eating show that the proposed system can recognize the user's eating motions with up to 95% accuracy and estimate the chewing and swallowing amount with 10% percentage error.