An On-Device Learning System for Estimating Liquid Consumption from Consumer-Grade Water Bottles and Its Evaluation

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Mar 25;22(7):2514. doi: 10.3390/s22072514.

Abstract

A lightweight on-device liquid consumption estimation system involving an energy-aware machine learning algorithm is developed in this work. This system consists of two separate on-device neural network models that carry out liquid consumption estimation with the result of two tasks: the detection of sip from gestures with which the bottle is handled by its user and the detection of first sips after a bottle refill. This predictive volume estimation framework incorporates a self-correction mechanism that can minimize the error after each bottle fill-up cycle, which makes the system robust to errors from the sip classification module. In this paper, a detailed characterization of sip detection is performed to understand the accuracy-complexity tradeoffs by developing and implementing a variety of different ML models with varying complexities. The maximum energy consumed by the entire framework is around 119 mJ during a maximum computation time of 300 μs. The energy consumption and computation times of the proposed framework is suitable for implementation in low-power embedded hardware that can be incorporated in consumer grade water bottles.

Keywords: TinyML; drink volume estimation; embedded machine learning; neural networks; on-device classification; sip detection.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Computers
  • Gestures
  • Machine Learning
  • Neural Networks, Computer*