JoulesEye: A Thermal Imaging-Based Measuring Approach for Respiration and Caloric Expenditure

JoulesEye is a smartphone thermal camera-based system that can accurately estimate calorie burn by monitoring respiration rate. Watch this video to learn more.

"When people see these numbers, they make changes in their behavior and that can be troublesome if the numbers are wrong," said Mayank Goel  , an associate professor in the School of Computer Science's Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) and Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "Our goal is that the time it takes to check your watch should be enough time to get the information we need."

Transcript

00:00:00 people regularly use their phones and watches to keep track of their physical activity and fitness levels two of the popular measures that users often look at while exercising or heart rate and calories the phones and watches have become quite good at measuring heart rate but calories are widely inaccurate for instance in our study with over 50 participants we found the

00:00:24 calorie expenditure estimate of a modern Smartwatch was wrong by almost 40% one of the most accurate ways of getting caloric expenditure is using an indirect calorimeter but they are expensive very bulky to use and almost impossible to carry around another measure that users find useful is respiration but except a course estimate while at rest

00:00:47 respiration signal is almost entirely missing from consumer devices we present J's eye a thermal imaging based approach to measure respiration and caloric expenditure we use a thermal camera to observe the condensation around the user's nostril when they inhale and subtle increase in temperature when they exhale we also measure the changes in

00:01:11 the temperature of different parts of a user's face while they exercise we collected data from 54 participants while they either biked or ran and estimated their respiration and caloric expenditure when compared to a clinical indirect calorimeter our estimates were almost 5% wrong in comparison a consumer Smartwatch was wrong by almost

00:01:34 40% we also made a smartwatch prototype for J's ey and used a lower resolution thermal camera to engineer for cost size and Battery as evident here the resolution is significantly lower but the condensation due to inhalation is still visible we demonstrate that ji is immediately Deployable and can measure respiration and caloric expenditure in real time in several settings overall a

00:01:59 simple addition of even a low resolution camera to a phone or a watch can improve the estimates of two of the most important physical measures in our daily lives