This necklace could help you lose weight - CNET

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You take a bite of a carrot. Snap! You nosh on soup. Slurp. You bite into a cookie. Crunch. The foods you eat make different sounds as you mash them with your teeth. University at Buffalo computer scientist Wenyao Xu decided to test whether technology can track food intake based on noises from eating.

Xu developed a necklace called AutoDietary. It uses a small microphone to listen to the sounds of chewing. Those sounds are matched up to an audio library through a smartphone app. "Each food, as it's chewed, has its own voice," Xu says.

Xu conducted a small study using 12 participants. They were each given water as well as apples, carrots, cookies, peanuts, walnuts and potato chips. The necklace was able to determine the right food 85 percent of the time.

The study, titled "AutoDietary: A Wearable Acoustic Sensor System for Food Intake Recognition in Daily Life," was published in the February 2016 issue of the IEEE Sensors Joual.