

Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App - cwan
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/ultimate_food_and_exercise_app/

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nadam
This is a bit impractical. Recognizing the food with few errors would be
horribly hard. I think it is sometinhg like speech recognition or automatic
translation: yes, it is easy to create some simple not very good speech
recognizer or translator software, but it is incredibly hard to create a high
quality one. The only remaining option is to create a user interface where the
user can type-in his daily food intake very easily/intuitively. Maybe most
users would want to do this on their computer's screen and not on a phone. Of
course there are plenty of calory-tracker, 'diet organizer' software on the
market like <http://www.dietorganizer.com/>. But I am not an expert in this
market.

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lliiffee
> Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard.

I wonder if it would be possible to have some sort of a hybrid system, where
automatic recognition is attempted, with a fall-back to manual input where
this fails. (The manual input could be to select from several automatic
"guesses") If the app stored all the data from all users, this could
eventually lead to a _really_ big database, and the automatic recognition
might get better and better.

EDIT: Also, automatic vegetable/fruit recognition is actually in production in
some supermarkets, for weighing/pricing. (I saw this in France.)

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d2viant
How will you know when you should fall back to manual? There's really no
measurement of accuracy that I can think of. If you've reached the point in
the algorithm where you know you've incorrectly identified the food it seems
like you've already solved the problem.

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lliiffee
That is a pretty common problem in machine learning. There are tons of
solutions, but they are usually classifier specific. For example, if using a
decision tree, one can take test data and determine for each leaf node in the
tree what fraction of instances are classified correctly. For leaf nodes with
accuracy below X, change the output of that node to "give up".

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tomjen3
I amuses me to no end how everybody assumes that the reason we eat unhealthy
food is that we don't know any better.

In reality, it is because unhealthy food taste better (not always, but most of
the time) and is a lot more convinient.

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acgourley
I disagree, I just yesterday showed someone than although they has switched
from Coke to apple juice, the apple juice actually had more sugar. People
don't all read labels.

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leftnode
Sure it may have more net carbohydrates, but the real difference is the
density of those calories and the types of carbohydrates they are.

Eating fast food contains saturated fats (and trans fats) which are incredibly
difficult for the body to break down. Olive oil, on the other hand, is almost
all monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which the body can break down
much easier.

So yes, I think the GGP poster was more correct in that sometimes people just
want a nice big fattening hamburger.

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thrdOriginal
Is that white cream topping a low-fat yogurt or some kind of delicious artery
clogging velouté sauce? That distinction alone could make a world a difference
if you're calorie/fat counting; different methods of cooking food that ends up
appearing the same can drastically change the healthiness of a food. In
general, someone's time might be better spent learning the basis of
maintaining a nutritional diet and everything that goes along with it, rather
than snapping pictures of everything eaten, twice.

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Robin_Message
I have a hack that makes this somewhat simpler — hook into people's online
grocery shopping. Then, all the stuff you eat at home can be counted
automatically. Obviously, it doesn't work so well if you throw food away (so
you have to tell the app that, or allow for a small amount of wastage) or
share food (so you have to say how many people live in the household and their
consumption profiles), but the data is available now.

Also, you don't need to measure exercise to help with weight-loss; instead
just work out how many calories the user is eating and then encourage them to
restrict that until they start losing weight (basically we are building an
eat-watch à la the hacker diet.)

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d2viant
Good idea, except roughly 40% of peoples' food budgets are spent on food
outside of the home.

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jeebusroxors
Supermarkets are cheaper than eating out.

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Robin_Message
I think what jeebusroxors was trying to say is that supermarkets still
contribute a majority of your calories since you get more calories per dollar
than you get eating out.

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endtime
>If it seems impossible that an app could recognize food types, consider that
software can already recognize faces, voices, specific songs, and
fingerprints. Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder.

Assuming "broccoli" is a stand-in for "arbitrary food", that's one of the most
wrong things I've ever seen Scott Adams say. Vision is a really hard problem,
and there's far more variance in the appearance of food than there is in those
of faces or fingerprints. (Recognizing songs is a non-sequitur.)

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dalore
Well if we limit the visual input to the realms of visible light then maybe
not, but what if your camera could recognize other frequencies, like infrared
and the brocoli gave off a unique set of frequencies that allowed it to be
identified. Also the app doesn't need to know about everything, just
everything food related, and not even all of it just the major.

It would also need a way to measure weight. It's all fair enough saying it's
broccoli but you also need to say how much.

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endtime
There are tons of probably-unsolvable problems with the idea (how can you tell
if something has cream filling from a picture?), but what I'm saying is that
even the vision one, which Adams explicitly seems to think is solvable, isn't.

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sahillavingia
Meh. Just recording the weights I do along with my body weight (along with a
graph of each) works fine, and it honestly couldn't be much easier [1].

[1] Shameless self-promotion: <http://daytaapp.com>

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peregrine
I love your app and wish I could find something similar for the Android
platform.

EDIT: Or something similar on Windows/Linux/Web(not Daytum)

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sahillavingia
Maybe a web-based compliment to Dayta for iPhone? It may be a possibility
(though don't bet on it).

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siglesias
Ideally restaurants would upload the nutrition facts of their foods to an
online database. (Maybe this should be legally required.)

Such a database would make this app more feasible, as the smart phone could
use GPS to figure out what restaurant it is in. Maybe even better would be a
numerical code next to each food item on the menu that could be input into a
smart phone to provide full nutrition facts. That seems like more of an
inevitability than a general picture scanner, offering superior ease of use
and, let's face it, technical feasibility.

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eogas
This mode of doing things is, for the most part, already available. There are
apps that work around the same principle as CalorieKing, where common
restaurants and foodstuffs are saved in a database with their respective
nutrition details. This tends to be very convenient when eating at popular
restaurants, or eating commonly purchased grocery items.

The GPS element is an interesting twist on the idea though. How cool would it
be if you walked into a Qdoba (just as an example), and your phone vibrated
and asked you what you were ordering?

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siglesias
Yeah, I've seen that kind of wiki-like functionality in the Livestrong
Nutrition app, and let's face the facts: preparation styles vary wildly among
different restaurants. If I type "slice of pizza" into that nutrition app, I
get "large slice," "cheese slice," "small slice," and several tens of
variations. It's okay, but not ideal. If I go to the local pizza joint, I want
to know fairly certainly what I'm getting in terms of calories if I order one
of their specialty pizzas. That's where I think a database would be useful.

As for the GPS, that would be very cool.

As has been said before, the biggest obstacle to food apps is mobilizing a
sales force to convince all restaurants to embrace a product. And because many
restaurants don't really have (or need) IT capabilities, it's actually costly
for them to implement computers and train staff to learn the particular
system. That's why OpenTable and others are having problems with adoption.

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naner
Sort of already exists... only in the other direction.

[http://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/2009/04/japanesetoilet-
an...](http://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/2009/04/japanesetoilet-analyzes-
your-stool/)

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seanalltogether
The biggest problem with a system like this is scale, how do you determine the
size of the portion? Consider these two pictures of mash potatoes

[http://www.mccormick.com/~/media/Images/Recipes/Recipe%20Det...](http://www.mccormick.com/~/media/Images/Recipes/Recipe%20Details/Side%20Dish/Garlic_Cheddar_Mashed_Potatoes.ashx?w=380)

[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6slcYXNa204/SwT183CdpjI/AAAAAAAABN...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_6slcYXNa204/SwT183CdpjI/AAAAAAAABN0/AWLXdX1sZxU/s320/GarlicMashedPotatoes_l.jpg)

We all know from years of experience that the first image is a larger bowl and
probably contains 6-8 times the amount as the second picture, but image
analysis would not.

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ryanmickle
Health data could be a powerful next data layer, perhaps as location has
become. There are some devices and apps in the space, but I haven't seen
anything yet that focuses on _publishing_ the data, as Foursquare focuses on
publishing location and tips and I think Adams has it right... it's got to be
easy (and fun) or people will just give up.

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francoisdevlin
Your figure publishes the data well enough.

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radley
I'm tired of calorie apps that think I only eat out at Chili's, McDonalds, and
other chains or prepackaged foods such as Mac & Cheese, Sara Lee, and Oreos.

The ultimate food calorie app would know the calories in a Mission burrito.

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lsb
It's so variable. I had a burrito last week at 24th and Shotwell that was more
than half the size of my upper arm.

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d2viant
There are no apps that will save you from that kind of decision.

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Tichy
I am pretty sure I have seen an app that does food recognition already. Not
sure if it was for iPhone, or traditional desktop.

The one sad aspect of this idea is that in theory, humans should be able to
determine their needs without external monitoring devices - certainly when it
comes to food.

Perhaps instead of an external device, it would be better to invest in some
self awareness? I realize, though, that it is not possible for everybody, in
fact, I also don't know a good way to learn it.

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eru
Most humans are capable of eating healthy. As most humans are capable of
recognizing faces. But not all.

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Daniel42
I almost always eat 100% of what I cook and put on my plate. After reading
this article it struck me that some people, or even a majority of people,
might not does the same. Do you throw away a significant amount of your food?

Of course I live alone and most of the time I cook what I bought in more than
one meal... But what I put in my plate always goes in my stomach. How could it
be otherwise? But if not, why bother with a picture of what have been left in
the plate!

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froggy
It would be a pain to pull a smartphone out before each meal to snap a
picture. To put some UX polish on this idea, it should be an embedded
appliance fitted inside the stomach or other suitable organ. I'm not a doctor,
but installing a device that "reads all input" would be more accurate, user-
friendly, and not require food photography 3-6 times a day.

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bryanh
This takes "feature X shouldn't be too hard to implement" to a whole new
level: "Recognizing broccoli can’t be that much harder."

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imgabe
_Perhaps your watch could display both the current time and how many days you
have left if you keep living the way you are._

I think walking around with a death clock ticking away on my wrist would
stress me out to the point of significantly lowering my life expectancy. Does
the app account for that?

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BornInTheUSSR
A lot of this is already available. DailyBurn with scanner app will fill in
nutritional info from labels. Scales transmit your weight to online services.
Fitbit will track your movement levels and sleep. Runkeeper will track how
much you run. Not perfect yet, but a synthesis is inevitable.

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RyanMcGreal
Someone just started working on Gourmet Goggles in their 20 percent time.

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jpr
If this ever becomes popular, I expect orthorexia rates to soar.

