TellSpec
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TellSpecopedia breaks down how ingredients affect your health
Few things in life are better than food, and even ridesharing companies like Uber are beginning to take note of this. Still, sometimes it's hard to know everything about the grub you're consuming, making you completely unaware of the impact certain stuff could have on your health. Enter TellSpec, a startup which has created a knowledge database, named TellSpecopedia, to provide people with detailed information on food ingredients. As it stands, the website covers a total of 1,300 every-day elements, including additives, contaminants and "manufacturing by-products," allowing you to search through them, find out what each ingredient is exactly and, ultimately, see if it's good or bad for your health. TellSpecopedia also lets you narrow things down and focus on how a specific ingredient can affect different sections on your body -- there are categories like Gastrointestinal Effects, Metabolic Effects, Cardiovascular Effects and many more. The new online database comes after TellSpec introduced a portable, $150 scanner last year, which allows users to identify food ingredients on the fly.
Switched On: The next steps for digital wellness, part one
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology. Some of today's leading wearable devices are, at their core, little more than souped-up pedometers. Their once-dim monochrome LCD screens have migrated from atoms to bits that connect to the internet, allowing them to display information in a more engaging way and track it over time. They have been a big win for output, but with essentially the same input. Indiegogo in particular has been a fertile launchpad for alternative wearables for the fitness enthusiast. One has been the Push band, which measures things such as force, power and velocity for activities like weightlifting. And the impact of that might be measured by the Skulpt Aim, which tracks muscle health. Another alternative to run monitors in development is the Atlas, which includes a digital footprint of 30 different exercises for more intelligent exercise analysis.
TellSpec identifies food ingredients and calories using science, magic
Some of us can't eat gluten, while others need to stay away from certain fats. Mealtime can be incredibly stressful for people with dietary restrictions -- especially when dining out -- since manufacturers aren't always required to report all ingredients, specifically when dealing with trace amounts. With frequent inaccuracies, counting calories is a whole 'nother ball game. A pocketable device called TellSpec may be an affordable solution for breaking down the ingredients in our meals consistently, and wherever we eat. The device is essentially a miniature spectrometer -- a device that can analyze materials (ingredients, in this case) by measuring properties of light. The gadget sends a list of ingredients and nutrition info to a companion smartphone app, making it easy to evaluate food quickly and efficiently. If you live to eat, you might not want TellSpec complicating the experience, but if you eat to live, this gadget seems like a fit. It's set to ship next August, with pre-orders at Indiegogo available for $150 beginning today.
