People often fail to control their calorie intakes because doing so requires conscious effort. While research on effects of sensory factors on food perception exist, manipulating these factors manually is challenging. However, recent advances in fabrication — for example, 3-D printing and laser cutting — now allow for automating modification of gustatory perceptions. We present FitFab, a food-fabrication technique that automates food-perception tricks to reduce calorie intake. We will investigate a computational model that estimates perceived satiety over food based on user psychophysical experiments, and build a prototype FitFab system that automates food-perception tricks to control calorie intake. We hypothesize that FitFab will help reduce calorie intake without sacrificing user perception of satiety.

I decided to participate in SuperUROP because I wanted to learn more about research in academia and the end-to-end process of conducting an independent research project. I am very excited to dive into the human-computer interface field and be able to tinker with both hardware and software in this project.