An AI that watches you while you eat can estimate how much you’re consuming, and could help people track their calorie intake
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| AI can analyse each spoonful you eat (Credit: Westend61 GmbH/Alamy) |
An artificial intelligence that watches you while you eat aims to automatically gauge the calories and nutrients in each spoonful.
Using AI to measure these facets of a meal isn’t a new idea, with previous models able to take an image of food on a plate and provide an estimate.
But in a single image of a meal, some items – such as ingredients submerged in a bowl of stew – are easy to miss, says Yuhao Chen at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
To address this, Chen and his colleagues have developed a new model that analyses a spoonful at a time. This approach is more accurate and could be a useful way of monitoring calories and nutrition, particularly for the ill or elderly, he says.
The model analyses video of a person eating and detects each spoonful of food they consume. It then estimates the volume of food on the spoon, and the discrepancy between this and actual measurements is as little as 4.4 per cent.
The system isn’t yet able to identify foods and estimate their nutritional content, but Chen says the team is working on this. Ultimately, the hope is the tool will be able to recognise a wide range of different foods, even those it hasn’t seen before, and to analyse food held with a fork, a hand or chopsticks.
An AI model would typically be trained on images of food with accurate labels, but Chen hopes to integrate large language models into such a system to help it identify ingredients in unseen recipes, or even totally novel recipes.
“We’re shifting towards using those large language models like ChatGPT to leverage the common knowledge to understand what is in the food or maybe ask a basic question [like] ‘is this chicken?’,” says Chen. “A lot of time, especially for people eating at home, the dish may not be a named dish. It may be just whatever is available in the fridge that they’ve mixed together.”
Emilie Combet Aspray at the University of Glasgow, UK, says remote measuring of calories can’t provide 100 per cent accuracy, so it may not be useful for strict scientific studies.
“There’s a lot of variability in vitamins in carrots,” says Combet Aspray. “There’s a lot of variability for everything in everything, and your specific carrot eaten today may be anywhere on that scale. A real challenge is the processing methods that we use to put food on our plates or, for example, estimating the amount of oil that has been used to fry a piece of meat. Those kind of camera-based tools aren’t necessarily able to evaluate that.”
But the AI tool could be valuable for nutritionists and dieticians, or any application where an approximation is good enough, such as individuals tracking their calorie and nutrient intake, says Combet Aspray.
Reference:
arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2405.08717
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