Non-invasive Moisture Content Prediction and Characterization of Chicken Meat Freshness by Bioelectrical Impedance Spectroscopy

This work provides a non-invasive system that characterizes the freshness of chicken meat. It addresses the subjective organoleptic inspection of meat inspectors and gives a counter measure for reselling above eight-hour meat by market vendors as prevented by the National Meat Inspection Service (NMIS). The system measures the moisture content in the chicken meat sample using bioelectrical impedance spectroscopy. Twenty-four equal-sized portions of chicken breast meat samples were evaluated on Ag/AgCl electrode pair connected to an impedance analyzer. The samples were divided into two sets; training set and testing sets. Sixteen samples were used for the training sets in order to establish a model for the experiment and eight samples were used in the testing set to validate the model. The results show a high correlation between the impedance parameters and both to the moisture content and postmortem time which both imposed a coefficient of correlation of 0.9315 which are all linearly dependent. The system thus show viability in assessing the quality of chicken breast meat in the market and its compliance to NMIS’ eight-hour rule and potentially to other meat.