CalorieCounting
Latest
Sweetgreen's iOS app logs calories directly to Apple Health
To this day, Apple Health still lacks a food database, leaving health-conscious iPhone owners with few options. Most people just end up relying on an Apple Health-integrated app, like MyFitnessPal, to tally all their meals. But, let's face it, that can be a pain, especially when it comes to searching for stuff you eat on the fly. However, Sweetgreen has come up with a nifty idea to make life easier for calorie-counters. In what seems to be a first, the restaurant chain's iPhone app lets you send your order's dietary data to Apple Health from your cart.
Smartphone accessory 3D-scans your food to count calories
Visual calorie-counting apps have appeared on smartphones before, but typically involved object identification through the camera (or barcode scanning, which isn't quite the same). Other apps, with more expensive subscription costs, would direct your photos to people hired to work out what you were putting in your mouth.While this route would probably offer the most precise answers, it's also not an instant one, and learning that delicious meat pie you ate for dinner goes over your calorie count for the day is no use once it's already long gone. The NutriRay3D adds some hardware to your existing smartphone, scanning the contents of your plate with lasers for high-precision calorie and nutrient estimates -- it's looking to crowdfunding to make it all happen.
Healbe GoBe review: Can a fitness band really track your calorie intake?
In 2015, a simple activity-tracking wearable just doesn't cut it. Unless, perhaps, it's cool-looking, or dirt cheap. Being able to keep tabs on how active you've been (or not) is certainly helpful; the problem is it's only one part of the picture. A fitness tracker might know I hustled my way through a 5K run this morning, but it doesn't know about the waffle-mania breakfast I enjoyed straight after. Some products work around this by letting you log your food intake. I'm prone to "forgetting" to log my meals, though, including the guilty, post-run carb-fest breakfasts. The dream fitness wearable, then, would be one that tracks your activity, auto-logs your sleep and knows what you've eaten without you telling it. Enter GoBe, by Healbe, a $300 wearable that promises to do exactly that.
NTT DoCoMo's mobile accessories smell your breath, tell you to put the burger down (video)
Sick of your friends saying you look fat in those jeans? Apparently, NTT DoCoMo feels your pain and aims to swap out the peer criticism with smartphone objectivity. Shown off in advance of CEATEC Japan 2011 (an annual electronics trade show), the operator took the wraps off several mobile-based accessories, ranging from gamma ray and UV light monitoring phone cases to a breathalyzer-like add-on for measuring body fat (you paying attention, HTC Rhyme?). There were also a couple of applications on hand for checking photos of food against a calorie database à la Google Goggles, and an AR implementation for weather services on tablets. It's not clear whether the Japanese carrier actually intends to release these innovations to the mass-consuming public, but as with all things tech in that corner of the world, they're sure to get it before we ever do. Jump past the break for a video peek at Nippon's creep towards a Hitchhiker Guide-style wireless world.
