Adeleke Justin Akinkurolere is wearing sensors on his wrist and jaw, chewing deliberately, his eating movements tracked in real time by technology that promises to reshape how nutrition scientists understand human behavior. The University of Rhode Island graduate student has cracked open a research frontier: simultaneous detection of both drinking and eating in the same meal—a seemingly simple idea that has never been properly studied before.
For decades, nutrition researchers have treated food and beverages as separate domains. One team studies how people eat; another studies how people drink. The insight that matters is this: the two are intimately linked. A sip of water while chewing might slow your pace. It might change how much you eat. But nobody had the tools to measure both at once—until now.
Akinkurolere's work, conducted at URI's Human Energy Balance Laboratory under the guidance of nutrition professor Kathleen Melanson, uses multimodal wearable sensors paired with machine-learning algorithms to detect and analyze what researchers call "ingestive microstructure"—the granular details of how people consume food and drink. The team also included psychology professors Theodore Walls and Nathan DeSalvo from URI, plus Professor Edison Thomaz and graduate student Cody Arvonen from the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering. Their findings appear in the journal Nutrients.
What makes this work distinctive is both the technology and the ambition. "To date, research on ingestive behaviors has mainly focused on just food or just beverages, but Adeleke is considering both together in multi-course meals," Melanson explained. The sensors capture movement data with such precision that machine learning can distinguish a sip from a chew, a pause from a swallow. That level of detail has never been systematically available before.
Akinkurolere, a Ph.D. student from Ondo State in Nigeria, became part of the project in fall 2024 as a graduate exchange student from Italy's University of Calabria. He has been involved in every stage—from institutional review board submission to participant recruitment to protocol management to data analysis. His poster on "Relationships Between Water Sipping Microstructure and Food Intake in Adults" ranked in the top 10% of nearly 750 submissions to the American Society for Nutrition's Emerging Leaders in Nutrition Science Poster Competition. He will present his findings at NUTRITION 2026, an international gathering of nutrition professionals, in National Harbor, Maryland, from July 25–28.
The practical stakes are significant. Understanding how sipping behaviors influence eating speed and quantity could lead to more personalized dietary recommendations. Someone who drinks frequently while eating might naturally consume less; understanding that pattern could inform better nutrition advice. For people managing weight, diabetes, or other diet-related conditions, these insights could prove transformative.
"My goal is to demonstrate how sipping behaviors might manage the speed and amount of food we consume, hence enhancing dietary evaluation and promoting tailored nutrition recommendations," Akinkurolere said. He expects to complete his Ph.D. in spring 2029, after which he plans to continue in academia while contributing to the food and nutrition industry, particularly in dietary monitoring and eating-behavior research. What began as a simple question—what if we watched food and drink together?—may reshape how the world thinks about eating.