Effective support of taste sense with intra-oral interface by drinking action detection

Support technology of taste sense by electrical stimulation is attracted attention as a method to have a satisfying meal for lifestyle diseases prevention due to the excessive intake of salt and sugar. However, the timing of applying the electrical stimulation is performed by manual control or physical contact. It is necessary to detect accurate timing of eating and drinking actions for automated supporting for taste sense. The automated detection of eating and drinking action reduces user's load. In this paper, we propose a new method for automatically detection of drinking action by measuring the ingestion and swallowing. The proposed method utilizes an intra-oral temperature change and movement of tongue during drinking. We experimented the measurement of temperatures at the three points in intra-oral area, and discovered features of temperature change for detecting the ingestion and swallowing actions. Finally, we implemented automatic drinking detection method to the intraoral interface, and evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method through the experiments.