A research team from the University of Buffalo have developed a necklace-like device named AutoDietary, to track food intake by listening to the chewing sound.

AutoDietary has got a microphone on the back to record the food chewing sound. This information will be sent to a connected smartphone via Bluetooth. The sound will then be uploaded to the cloud database, where it would be compared with existing chewing data for varied foods.

Wenyao Xu, the lead investigator cum computer scientist said, "There is no shortage of wearable devices that tell us how many calories we burn, but creating a device that reliably measures caloric intake isn't so easy."

In a trial work, this device was able to identify around 85 percent of all foods accurately. There is a significant limitation in the fact that the device is unable to differentiate between similar foods like frosted flakes and corn flakes. For the time being, the lead author Xu is working on integrating a biosensor system which would easily track the nutritional data of food. Once it becomes commercialized, it could help the patients who are obese or suffer from diabetes to track their food pattern.

This food chewing detection idea was inspired from the device named Automatic Ingestion Monitor (AIM), invented in 2014. This AIM device would monitor the vibrations from jaw movement but is yet to hit markets.