Pilot Study of Early Meal Onset Detection from Abdominal Sounds

A typical artificial pancreas depends only on the continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) value for insulin dosing. However, both the insulin infusion and the glucose sensing are subject to time delays and slow dynamics. An automated and reliable meal onset information could enhance the control outcome of artificial pancreas by making it possible to infuse insulin earlier and thereby avoid large postprandial glucose excursions. In this study we employ abdominal sounds recorded in two healthy volunteers with a condenser microphone and propose an automated approach for meal onset detection from abdominal sounds. We use the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and wavelet entropy extracted from the abdominal sounds as features. These features are fed to a simple feed forward neural network for discriminating meal from no-meal abdominal sounds. This approach detects meal onset with an average delay of 4.3 minutes in our limited number of subjects. More importantly, it provides lesser response delay than the state-of-the-art CGM based approach, which achieved a response delay ranging from 30-40 minutes. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed abdominal sound-based approach may provide early meal onset information. This can be exploited in an artificial pancreas through allowable earlier meal insulin boluses, resulting in improved glycemic control.