Activity Recognition and Healthier Food Preparation

Ploetz, T; Moynihan, P; Pham, C; Olivier, P

doi:10.2991/978-94-91216-05-3_14

Activity Recognition and Healthier Food Preparation

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Thomas Ploetz, Professor Paula Moynihan, Cuong Pham, Professor Patrick Olivier ORCiD

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Abstract

Obesity is an increasing problem for modern societies, which implies enormous financial burdens for public health-care systems. There is growing evidence that a lack of cooking and food preparation skills is a substantial barrier to healthier eating for a significant proportion of the population. We present the basis for a technological approach to promoting healthier eating by encouraging people to cook more often. We integrated tri-axial acceleration sensors into kitchen utensils (knifes, scoops, spoons), which allows us to continuously monitor the activities people perform while acting in the kitchen. A recognition framework is described, which discriminates ten typical kitchen activities. It is based on a sliding-window procedure that extracts statistical features for contiguous portions of the sensor data. These frames are fed into a Gaussian mixture density classifier, which provides recognition hypotheses in real-time. We evaluated the activity recognition system by means of practical experiments of unconstrained food preparation. The system achieves classification accuracy of ca. 90% for a dataset that covers 20 persons’ cooking activities.