赤外線センサを用いた無接触型咀嚼回数測定装置

抄録

Recently our chewing number is declined to decrease owing to softening of foodstuffs. That has influence on our health and development of brain cells, especially for children. Receiving the request of a dentist, we developed a chewing number counting equipment that can be used with the easiness like a pedometer. That equipment detects the small expansion of the temporal muscle using a head band with a semiconductor pressure sensor. After practical uses, it was clarified that it has some time for children to attach the equipment at the correct place and some people don't want to attach the head band in their meal time. In this paper, for solving the problems mentioned above, we propose a new type chewing number counting equipment that uses an infrared sensor attached at the temple of one's glasses. The proposed equipment can detect the chewing number without touching one's head and be easily adjusted by changing a sensor load resistor.
As a result, we could get the counting accuracy with 4.6% errors.