A recently made friend Bradley McLain and I were discussing a company he helped start with an application that allowed users to track their food through an online food diary. It does lots more than that, but for now that's one of the key features. It's for fitness and dieting. And it interests me because the few times I've tried to journal my food on a daily basis I've failed miserably. I can't even keep my weight tracked daily very well.
I've always thought there must be a way technology could help make this easy for me. After all, I don't have any problem eating the food. I just can't document what I eat. And, invariably, that means I eat too much and say "huh, how could I really have eaten so much."
My best thought was maybe I could attach a scanner, like those in the grocery store, to my mouth. You know, just like those self-serve check out lines where even you can scan your stuff. But, this could be attached to my mouth and when I stuffed something in it went "bleep" and registered the intake. I didn't go so far as to also measure my output (ick), but you get the idea.
Of course, no one makes this check out scanner for your mouth. But then I got to thinking: what do we carry around that could be the data input device. Then I remembered an article about the MoBlog I saw a few years ago. The idea is that so many folks have camera phones, they just snap pictures that get emailed to their picture-blog. So you can go look at Jane Smith's pictures that she is posting in near real-time. You can see her day through her eyes on the web through her camera.
So why couldn't you record your food the same way? Viola. The Food MoBlog. You set it up so you can snap a picture from your camera phone and it gets shot off to your food diary online. Even better (this is the part the geek in me loves), you photograph the nutritional label or even best the UPC symbol.
Your Food MoBlog has some fancy image processing in the back-end that detects a UPC, looks up the nutritional content and adds it up for you on-the-fly. If it's a standard nutritional label, it can probably parse that too using OCR software since the labels are more standard now.
Of course, you might be eating in a restaurant at which point you can just snap a picture of what you're about to eat and use the journal to research your best guess at the nutrition at the end of the day. But I, for one, could use that sort of easy to use food journal to at least figure out where I stand in my caloric intake to start making a difference.
Of course, now I need a camera phone and lots of time to develop this cool software...
Or perhaps it's already been done (not all the cool UPC things) by http://www.myfoodphone/.