A seminar entitled (AUTOMATIC FOOD-INTAKE MONITORING BASED ON IOT EMBEDDED SYSTEM FOR ALZHEIMER’S PATIENTS) was given by Lect. Dr. Amir Qais Obaid from the Control and Systems Engineering Department. The lecture was related to his Ph.D. thesis from Western Michigan University / College of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

In the United States, more than 80% of patients care is provided at home by more than 16 million family members, friends, or other unpaid caregivers. Alzheimer’s patients in the middle and late stages begin to lose the ability to know the significance of drinking and eating even when hungry. It is essential to use technology to enhance these patients’ daily lives while simultaneously reducing the significant time spent by the caregivers. Developing a successful Food-Intake Monitoring System (FIMS) to monitor and encourage the patients to get their meals will reduce the cost of individual caregiving and ease the situation of loved ones caring for their elders and allow the patients to feed themselves. In this dissertation, FIMS implementations based on three different realizations have been defined and implemented using embedded IOT system Raspberry Pi 3 Plus, and tested at the Digital Signal and Image Processing Laboratory (DISPLAY) at Western Michigan University. The FIMS will monitor the eating activity and send alerts or emails to the caregiver and, at the same time, prompt a video after a period of time when the patient does not eat, encouraging them to eat or reminding them how to eat. The seminar was attended by the Assistant Head of the Department for Scientific Affairs and Graduate Studies (Prof. Dr. Mohamed Youssef Hassan).