Reply to "Comment on ’Non-invasive monitoring of chewing and swallowing for objective quantification of ingestive behavior" Edward Sazonov 1,5 , Stephanie Schuckers 1 , Paulo Lopez-Meyer 1 , Oleksandr Makeyev 1 , Nadezhda Sazonova 2 , Edward L. Melanson 3 , and Michael Neuman 4 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Ave, Potsdam, NY 13699 USA 2 Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26505, USA 3 University of Colorado, Denver, School of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes, and the Center for Human Nutrition, Denver, CO 80262 USA 4 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931 USA E-mail: esazonov@cias.clarkson.edu Non-invasive monitoring of ingestion is an exciting and intriguing area of research. The worldwide growth of obese population still puzzles the researchers who cannot provide a definite answer to the etiology of this “obesity epidemic”. Our work in the area is focused on developing compliant, non-invasive and easy-to-use devices for monitoring of ingestive behaviors that may shed a light on eating behaviors associated with obesity and be used in behavioral therapies. We want to know when each episode of ingestions takes place, how much was consumed and, preferably, determine type and caloric density of the food being consumed. From the first journal publication of Amft and Troster in February, 2008 [1] we were glad to learn that somebody else shares our approach to non-invasive monitoring of ingestion. We are excited to see the growth of the research area and hope that it will lead to better methods of non-invasive monitoring and help in fighting the obesity epidemic. We thank Dr. Amft for his comments and would like to use this opportunity to respond to some of the key criticisms expressed in his letter. The goal of any introduction and literature review is to highlight the state of the art, rather than to point out every existing publication in the field and this means that it generally will not be possible to reference every work in the area. For example, our early conference publications on swallowing sound recognition [2-3] were not referenced by Dr. Amft in [1] which proposes such a methodology. Time is also a factor which cannot be discounted. The journal publication [1] was published almost at the same time as our paper (February vs. April of 2008), and thus it was not possible to include that publication in the review of prior work at the time the manuscript was written. The same can be said about the publications that came out several months later [4] or are not yet published [5]. We appreciate the opportunity to alert readers to earlier less-accessible conference publications [6-10] of Amft et al. 5 Corresponding author: Edward Sazonov, PhD