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IntroductionFood cravings are common in pregnancy and along with emotional eating and eating in the absence of hunger, they are associated with excessive weight gain and adverse effects on metabolic health including gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). Women with GDM also show poorer mental health, which further can contribute to dysregulated eating behaviour. Food cravings can lead to greater activity in brain centres known to be involved in food ‘wanting’ and reward valuation as well as emotional eating. They are also related to gestational weight gain. Thus, there is a great need to link implicit brain responses to food with explicit measures of food intake behaviour, especially in the perinatal period. The aim of this study is to investigate the spatiotemporal brain dynamics to visual presentations of food in women during pregnancy and in the post partum, and link these brain responses to the eating behaviour and metabolic health outcomes in women with and without GDM. Methods and analysisThis prospective observational study will include 20 women with and 20 without GDM, that have valid data for the primary outcomes. Data will be assessed at 24–36 weeks gestational age and at 6 months post partum. The primary outcomes are brain responses to food pictures of varying carbohydrate and fat content during pregnancy and in the post partum using electroencephalography. Secondary outcomes including depressive symptoms, current mood and eating behaviours will be assessed with questionnaires, objective eating behaviours will be measured using Auracle and stress will be measured with heart rate and heart rate variability (Actiheart). Other secondary outcome measures include body composition and glycaemic control parameters. Ethics and disseminationThe Human Research Ethics Committee of the Canton de Vaud approved the study protocol (2021-01976). Study results will be presented at public and scientific conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. 

Poor eating habits in children and teenagers can lead to obesity, eating disorders, or life-threatening health problems. Although researchers have studied children’s eating behavior for decades, the research community has had limited technology to support the observation and measurement of fine-grained details of a child’s eating behavior. In this paper, we present the feasibility of adapting the Auracle, an existing research-grade earpiece designed to automatically and unobtrusively recognize eating behavior in adults, for measuring children’s eating behavior. We identified and addressed several challenges pertaining to monitoring eating behavior in children, paying particular attention to device fit and comfort. We also improved the accuracy and robustness of the eating-activity detection algorithms. We used this improved prototype in a lab study with a sample of 10 children for 60 total sessions and collected 22.3 hours of data in both meal and snack scenarios. Overall, we achieved an accuracy exceeding 85.0% and an F1 score exceeding 84.2% for eating detection with a 3-second resolution, and a 95.5% accuracy and a 95.7% F1 score for eating detection with a 1-minute resolution.