Proximity-based active learning for eating moment recognition in wearable systems

Detecting when eating occurs is an essential step toward automatic dietary monitoring, medication adherence assessment, and diet-related health interventions. Wearable technologies play a central role in designing unobtrusive diet monitoring solutions by leveraging machine learning algorithms that work on time-series sensor data to detect eating moments. While much research has been done on developing activity recognition and eating moment detection algorithms, the performance of the detection algorithms drops substantially when the model is utilized by a new user. To facilitate the development of personalized models, we propose PALS, Proximity-based Active Learning on Streaming data, a novel proximity-based model for recognizing eating gestures to significantly decrease the need for labeled data with new users. Our extensive analysis in both controlled and uncontrolled settings indicates F-score of PALS ranges from 22% to 39% for a budget that varies from 10 to 60 queries. Furthermore, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, off-line PALS achieves up to 40% higher recall and 12% higher F-score in detecting eating gestures.