Towards On-Device Dehydration Monitoring Using Machine Learning from Wearable Device’s Data

With the ongoing advances in sensor technology and miniaturization of electronic chips, more applications are researched and developed for wearable devices. Hydration monitoring is among the problems that have been recently researched. Athletes, battlefield soldiers, workers in extreme weather conditions, people with adipsia who have no sensation of thirst, and elderly people who lost their ability to talk are among the main target users for this application. In this paper, we address the use of machine learning for hydration monitoring using data from wearable sensors: accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope, galvanic skin response sensor, photoplethysmography sensor, temperature, and barometric pressure sensor. These data, together with new features constructed to reflect the activity level, were integrated with personal features to predict the last drinking time of a person and alert the user when it exceeds a certain threshold. The results of applying different models are compared for model selection for on-device deployment optimization. The extra trees model achieved the least error for predicting unseen data; random forest came next with less training time, then the deep neural network with a small model size, which is preferred for wearable devices with limited memory. Embedded on-device testing is still needed to emphasize the results and test for power consumption.