Electronic Prototype for Heart Rate Measurement Oriented to Emotions Generated by Tasting Food

The food industry is interested in creating new products that are accepted by consumers. To achieve this, tests or technological tools are required to establish the consumer’s response to consuming a food. For this reason, this article shows a custom-developed prototype, which is part of a device that is in the process of patent application. This prototype is capable of measuring the heart rate and the R-R distance of each heartbeat using the photoplestimography technique, simultaneously. The prototype is able to reduce motion artifacts by using an algorithm based on Least Mean Squares, which performs adaptive motion cancellation. The prototype was developed with the purpose of being useful for the food sector, allowing, through the reading of body variables, the prediction of the acceptance of a food by means of the relationship between the standard deviation of the R-R intervals (SDNN) with the emotions that occur before, during and after the ingestion of the food. The results revealed significant variations in SDNN between foods that were hedonistically rated as pleasant and unpleasant, allowing us to find a relationship between heart rate and emotions aimed at predicting the acceptance of a food. However, further experimental tests should continue to be carried out to establish a correlation between the physiological variables mentioned and the emotions generated when consuming a food. This will allow predicting the possible acceptance or rejection of a food.