# SCH: Wearable Sensing and Visual Analytics to Estimate Receptivity to Just-In-Time Interventions for Eating Behavior

> **NIH NIH R01** · PURDUE UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $276,171

## Abstract

Poor diet is a leading cause of preventable death and diseases, as well as preventable healthcare costs in
the United States. Despite the importance of following a healthy dietary pattern, most U.S. adults do not
meet national dietary guidelines and are either overweight or obese. There is a critical need for
"just-in-time" (JIT) interventions to improve diet and eating behaviors as they occur. To maximize impact,
JIT interventions should only be delivered when an individual is receptive, particularly when dietary quality
is poor. However, which aspects of the food environment and dietary behavior have influence on dietary
intake and quality are unknown, and how they relate to JIT intervention receptivity is unexplored. This
would require collecting and analyzing near-continuous data about one's diet in the context of daily life,
where behavior actually occurs, which is very challenging for researchers and burdensome for
participants. Advances in wearable sensor technologies, equipped with novel computational methods
could provide a pathway to capture and analyze the various exposures and patterns in the eating
environment to fill this gap. The overall objective of this proposal is to create an integrated system of
wearable sensor and computational methods to discover food environment exposures related to dietary
quality that influence JIT intervention receptivity. Motivated by this vision, the objectives of this research
include: 1) develop novel edge computing hardware and software for privacy-preserving compressive
image capture and transmission, 2) develop new collaborative compression and analytics together with
unsupervised continual learning to understand eating behavior, 3) determine whether sensed aspects of
the environmental context during eating relate to dietary quality and receptivity to JIT interventions,
particularly when the dietary quality is poor. The project is a collaborative effort combining expertise in
wearable electronics, image processing, dietary patterns, and behavioral science.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10911895
- **Project number:** 5R01CA277839-03
- **Recipient organization:** PURDUE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** EDWARD S SAZONOV
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $276,171
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-08-26 → 2026-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10911895

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10911895, SCH: Wearable Sensing and Visual Analytics to Estimate Receptivity to Just-In-Time Interventions for Eating Behavior (5R01CA277839-03). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10911895. Licensed CC0.

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