Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating

Behavior modification in health is difficult, as habitual behaviors are extremely well-learned, by definition. This research is focused on building a persuasive system for behavior modification around emotional eating. In this paper, we make strides towards building a just-in-time support system for emotional eating in three user studies. The first two studies involved participants using a custom mobile phone application for tracking emotions, food, and receiving interventions. We found lots of individual differences in emotional eating behaviors and that most participants wanted personalized interventions, rather than a pre-determined intervention. Finally, we also designed a novel, wearable sensor system for detecting emotions using a machine learning approach. This system consisted of physiological sensors which were placed into women’s brassieres. We tested the sensing system and found positive results for emotion detection in this mobile, wearable system.