MedBuds: in-ear inertial medication taking detection using smart wireless earbuds

Wireless earbuds are gaining in popularity these days, especially for smart mobile phone pairing. Some of these devices are getting smart as they embed motion sensors to monitor head and mouth movements. The embodiment of these sensors can enable important mobile health applications such as medication adherence monitoring. Existing solutions are often focused on capturing hand gestures associated with medication retrieval and thus they are inaccurate and do not detect med-ication ingestion. Other solutions use neck-worn systems which make them uncomfortable and socially unacceptable.

In this paper, we present MedBuds, a smart system for medication-taking activity detection using earbud embedded IMUs and a pairing device (e.g., a smartphone). To evaluate our approach, we conducted preliminary experiments examining semi-medication-taking activities (i.e. swallowing) and non-medication-taking activities (speaking and chewing). Our results show the possibility of distinguishing between these activities with more than 84 % accuracy. We believe that by coupling MedBuds with other monitoring techniques (e.g. smart pill bottles), the overall performance of medication adherence monitoring systems can be improved.