Companion robots to solve aging dietary problems

Later City News: Very soon we can see companion robots that are able to solve our older adults' dietary problems by listening to them.

A new proposed algorithm for companion robots is capable of understanding users' dietary compositions for one-person talking, a two-person chat, and a three-person chat, respectively.

As the problem of an aging population becomes more and more serious, social robots have an increasingly significant influence on human life. By employing regular question-and-answer conversations or wearable devices, some social robotics products can establish personal health archives. But those robots are unable to collect diet information automatically through robot vision or audition.

A healthy diet can reduce a person's risk of developing cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and other age-related diseases. In order to automatically perceive the dietary composition of the elderly by listening to people's chatting, research done by Zhidong Su, Yang Li, Guanci Yang from Guizhou University, China proposed a chat-based automatic dietary composition perception algorithm (DCPA).

This paper which has been published in IEEE journal confirms that current robot products provide the function of chatting, household appliance control, taking photographs, collecting health data, detecting falls, and so on, they have a shortage of intelligence and do not have a strong ability in cognition.

Especially in Europe, Japan, and China the personal robots market is growing intensively, The robot market currently generating $21.5 billion and expected to reach higher than $51 billion in 2030. This situation accelerated research on robots and methods of judging and data collection and monitoring.

Some works provide a method for judging if people are eating while speaking and what they are eating by monitoring eating sounds but in the home env