Food intake monitoring for elderly people

Speaker:Dr. Gert Mertes(University of Leuven)

Time and Date: 10:00 - , Mar. 28, 2017

Place: Room 521, Physics Building, Handan Campus

 

 

Abstract

In elderly care, the monitoring of nutritional intake typically happens with pen-and-paper tools or is omitted completely because of its time consuming nature. Because of this, care personnel don’t always have a complete overview of a person’s nutritional intake which can be vital in correctly diagnosing underlying conditions or tailoring the daily intake to the person’s requirements. In order to reduce the work load of manually monitoring a person’s food intake, we propose an automated system using environmental and wearable sensors optimised for use in elderly care. This means that the system requires little to be non-invasive, requires little to none user input, is comfortable to wear and at a low cost. In this talk, the use of accelerometers to detect a person’s chewing motion as well as a ‘smart plate’ are discussed to achieve this goal.

 

 

Biography

Gert Mertes received his MSc. in Engineering Technology from Lessius (now KU Leuven) in 2013 and is working as a PhD researcher for the department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT) of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. His PhD project attempts to provide a technological solution to prevent malnutrition in the elderly by automatically detecting a person’s food intake in a non-invasive and comfortable manner. Gert’s professional interests include ambient assisted living, digital signal processing, machine learning and embedded system design. Gert is currently staying at Fudan University under supervision of Prof. Wei Chen as a visiting scholar to collaborate on the detection of nutritional intake in elderly persons in China.