Can a machine identify what you’re chewing, merely from the sound? Yes, if you are at a laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, or Hall-in-Tirol, Austria, and if you are chewing potato chips, apples, mixed lettuce, pasta or boiled rice.
Oliver Amft, Mathias St?ger and Gerhard Tr?ster, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and Paul Lukowicz, of Austria’s University for the Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, describe their work succinctly: “Using wearable microphones to detect and classify chewing sounds (called mastication sounds) from the user’s mouth.” But, they explain, this is just stage one of their dream…
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.