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Activity Recognition and Healthier Food Preparation

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Part of the book series: Atlantis Ambient and Pervasive Intelligence ((ATLANTISAPI,volume 4))

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.

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Correspondence to Thomas Plötz .

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© 2011 Atlantis Press

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Plötz, T., Moynihan, P., Pham, C., Olivier, P. (2011). Activity Recognition and Healthier Food Preparation. In: Chen, L., Nugent, C., Biswas, J., Hoey, J. (eds) Activity Recognition in Pervasive Intelligent Environments. Atlantis Ambient and Pervasive Intelligence, vol 4. Atlantis Press. https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-91216-05-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-91216-05-3_14

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  • Publisher Name: Atlantis Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-78677-42-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-91216-05-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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