PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Laband real-world validation of a system for monitoring ingestive behavior Project Summary: Population-based and short-term laboratory findings demonstrate eating behaviors linked to overeating and excess body weight can be modified to reduce energy intake and enhance satiety. These findings suggest that slowing specific ingestive behaviors (IB; bites, chews, oral processing) may thus be effective for healthy body weight management. However, no accurate automated methodology exists to measure these combined IB outside laboratories, in people's free-living, real-world settings. Thus, the central goal of the proposed project is to validate and test a wearable device assembly pairing two validated instruments that can provide these measurements with good accuracy and low participant burden. One is a wrist-worn bite counter, which detects the wrist-roll motion associated with placing food in the mouth, tracking bite number and bites per minute for each eating episode. The other is a discreet chewing sensor adhered to the skin over the condyle bone, to detect chewing frequency and duration, as well as oral processing. Combined, these sensors can provide data on chew-to-bite ratio (which has implications in energy intake and satiety) and can capture overall eating episodes and IB with more precision than a single device alone. The project includes laboratory aims, supported by two studies for device assembly validation across a range of foods, beverages, utensils and eating styles, along with real-world aims, supported by three studies that progress from semi-controlled to true free-living settings in people's everyday lives. These will include restaurants, cafeterias, work, school, and home lives. Device assembly data will be compared to multiple established ground truth measures such as video, the universal eating monitor, observation, and self-reports. Participants will represent a broad range of body mass index, adult ages, genders, and race/ethnicity, with over-representation from LatinX communities, who experience higher incidence of obesity and associated health conditions. Our multi-disciplinary team includes a nutritionist specializing in eating behaviors associated with obesity, a psychologist specializing in behavior monitoring through wearable technologies and longitudinal analysis, and a computer engineer specializing in wearable devices to detect IB. Scientific automated impacts f this project lie in developing a tool to enable long-term free-living data collection on behaviors vital for weight management. o Health impacts lie in potentially equipping people with a passive self-monitoring tool for improving eating behaviors and diet, with minimal participant burden, yet optimizing impact through targeting key IB. Thus, promising multi-disciplinary laboratory findings will be moved to free-living settings with a user-friendly non-invasive digital device assembly, allowing for self-monitoring. The management ultimate goal is t o facilitate evidence-based personalized weight programs leveraging real-world modification of eating behavior that are scalable to large populations.

Project Narrative Although empirical evidence supports a strong relationship between human eating behaviors, food intake, and obesity, research outside the lab and development of interventions to improve eating behaviors have been hindered by lack of accurate automated technology to track free-living eating behaviors. This project will develop and test a discreet wearable device assembly to track a key combination of eating behaviors, starting with laboratory validations and progressing to free-living situations with a variety of foods and beverages in adults across a broad range of BMI, age, genders, and race/ethnicity, with oversampling from LatinX communities, who experience higher prevalence of obesity and associated co-morbidities. The long term goal is to enable researchers to better understand how real-world eating behaviors influence body weight regulation and health, how eating behaviors can effectively be modified, and how people can be provided with tools to improve their everyday eating behaviors.