Video analysis of chewing patterns Arran Wilson, Ian Waters, Lidia Motoi, Esther Kim, Marco Morgenstern. The New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Limited, Lincoln

The chewing of food is a complex process, combining the physical breakdown of food and mixing it with saliva to form a swallowable bolus, along with a release of flavour to produce a pleasant sensory experience. The details of the process vary greatly among people, and interacts with different food types. But is there a relationship between how people chew their food, their individual chewing strategies, and their sensory perception of that food? Or is even their choice of food determined by their chewing style? Can chewing patterns be grouped into categories? By using a compact digital camera to video people with markers on their chin and nose chewing we have been able to track their chin movement with sufficient accuracy to measure several chewing parameters and relate these to their sensory responses. This simple technique allows the recoding of a large number of individual chewing profiles, which lends itself to the application of data mining techniques to look for the relationships between chewing style and sensory perception. I will describe this work along with the further developments in the automated recording and tracking of chin movement and subsequent analysis.