Evaluation of MS Kinect for elderly meal intake monitoring

Abstract

Any form of eating disorder is detrimental for health. Having an eating disorder increases the risks for chronic diseases and general morbidity, leading to several health problems such as obesity, hypertension and cardio-vascular diseases. The risk is greater for elderly people, as ageing submits the body to several functional changes that affect health and nutrition conditions. Automatic monitoring systems can help to prevent these risks by supporting people to maintain appropriate eating behaviours. Ageing services based on ICT assistive services are increasing as a result of the awareness of the growing socio-economic relevance of this issue, especially when we consider the rural and very sparsely-populated areas. In order to assess these requirements, systems should be automatic, non-intrusive and low cost. This paper presents an evaluation test of the Microsoft Kinect sensor for monitoring older people's meal intake, with the aim of contributing to the development of an automatic diet monitoring system. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).