Wearable Devices: Gaps and Future Needs for Technology

The term 'wearable' traditionally defined as clothing or something that people wear on the body that can be interpreted as clothing. Today, the definition has changed, and it has a new meaning. The term 'wearable' brings up images such as accessories that are worn on the body that contains data and information processing related to the activities being monitored. This type of wearables can be personalized for specific applications such as fitness, healthcare, entertainment, etc to the extent that can transform our lives. In today’s world, wearables are not only for fun but also for vital data monitoring and processing that are required for health and safety. In short, the wearables can deliver unique values to the users or those who are accessing the data. Healthcare and well-being are among the popular drivers for wearable technology. An abundance of wearable devices has been developed and produced for health monitoring that can change towards a healthy lifestyle. One aspect of human lifestyle that is increasingly attracting huge interest is diet monitoring. This is typically driven by the relationship between food intake and body weight and how the diet choices correlated with life circumstances and diseases.

An increasing number of people are aware of the importance to monitor their diet intake. This has led to the active development of automatic diet monitoring using wearable system to replace the conventional manual reporting of using pen and paper or digital assistants such as smartphone for diet logging. Huge efforts have been devoted by the research community to produce a novel, real-time, unobtrusive and accurate diet monitoring solutions that can automatically identify diet activities and provide relevant information and recommendations to the users. This talk will explore the recent development of wearable systems for diet monitoring and discuss the gaps and challenges associated with the development as well as the future direction of the technology.