In this paper, we propose BodyBeat, a novel mobile sensing system
for capturing and recognizing a diverse range of non-speech body
sounds in real-life scenarios. Non-speech body sounds, such as
sounds of food intake, breath, laughter, and cough contain invaluable
information about our dietary behavior, respiratory physiology,
and affect. The BodyBeat mobile sensing system consists of
a custom-built piezoelectric microphone and a distributed computational
framework that utilizes an ARM microcontroller and an
Android smartphone. The custom-built microphone is designed
to capture subtle body vibrations directly from the body surface
without being perturbed by external sounds. The microphone is
attached to a 3D printed neckpiece with a suspension mechanism.
The ARM embedded system and the Android smartphone process
the acoustic signal from the microphone and identify non-speech
body sounds. We have extensively evaluated the BodyBeat mobile
sensing system. Our results show that BodyBeat outperforms other
existing solutions in capturing and recognizing different types of
important non-speech body sounds.