An Intelligent Nutritional Assessment System

Higher life expectancies lead to an increased prevalenceof dementia in older adults, which is projected torise dramatically in the future. The link between malnutritionand dementia highlights the need to closelymonitor nutrition as early as possible. However, currentself-report assessment methods are labor-intensive,time-consuming and inaccurate. Technology has the potentialof assisting in nutritional analysis by alleviatingthe cognitive load of recording food intake and lesseningthe burden of care for the elderly. Therefore, we proposean intelligent nutritional assessment system thatwill monitor the dietary patterns of older adults with dementiaat their homes. Our computer vision-based systemconsists of food recognition and portion estimationalgorithms that, together, provide nutritional analysisof an image of a meal. We create a novel food imagedataset on which we achieve an 87.2% recognition accuracy.We apply several well-known segmentation andrecognition algorithms and analyze their suitability tothe food recognition problem.