CONF Meegahapola_MUM-2_2020/IDIAP Alone or With Others? Understanding Eating Episodes of College Students with Mobile Sensing Meegahapola, Lakmal Buddika Ruiz-Correa, Salvador Gatica-Perez, Daniel Eating Behavior food diaries mHealth mobile sensing passive sensing smartphone sensing social context wearable sensing well-being EXTERNAL http://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2020/Meegahapola_MUM-2_2020.pdf PUBLIC ACM - 19th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia Essen, Germany MUM 2020 2020 Association for Computing Machinery New York, NY, USA 162–166 9781450388702 https://doi.org/10.1145/3428361.3428463 URL 10.1145/3428361.3428463 doi Understanding food consumption patterns and contexts using mobile sensing is fundamental to build mobile health applications that require minimal user interaction to generate mobile food diaries. Many available mobile food diaries, both commercial and in research, heavily rely on self-reports, and this dependency limits the long term adoption of these apps by people. The social context of eating (alone, with friends, with family, with a partner, etc.) is an important self-reported feature that influences aspects such as food type, psychological state while eating, and the amount of food, according to prior research in nutrition and behavioral sciences. In this work, we use two datasets regarding the everyday eating behavior of college students in two countries, namely Switzerland (Nch=122) and Mexico (Nmx=84), to examine the relation between the social context of eating and passive sensing data from wearables and smartphones. Moreover, we design a classification task, namely inferring eating-alone vs. eating-with-others episodes using passive sensing data and time of eating, obtaining accuracies between 77% and 81%. We believe that this is a first step towards understanding more complex social contexts related to food consumption using mobile sensing.