Towards a Wearable Interface for Food Quality Grading through ERP Analysis
This addresses the need for faster food quality grading in industrial and marketing contexts, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing ERP methods for a specific application.
The paper tackled the problem of time-consuming sensory evaluation of food quality by proposing a wearable system that measures Event-related potentials (ERPs) from visual stimuli to directly assess perceived quality, with preliminary results showing it can identify and classify food acceptance grades.
Sensory evaluation is used to assess the consumer acceptance of foods or other consumer products, so as to improve industrial processes and marketing strategies. The procedures currently involved are time-consuming because they require a statistical approach from measurements and feedback reports from a wide set of evaluators under a well-established measurement setup. In this paper, we propose to collect directly the signal of the perceived quality of the food from Event-related potentials (ERPs) that are the outcome of the processing of visual stimuli. This permits to narrow the number of evaluators since errors related to psychological factors are by-passed. We present the design of a wearable system for ERP measurement and we present preliminary results on the use of ERP to give a quantitative measure to the appearance of a food product. The system is developed to be wearable and our experiments demonstrate that is possible to use it to identify and classify the grade of acceptance of the food.