How did this system actually track calories? Detecting that the user is consuming food seems like a fairly solvable problem; tracking what they’re eating—which is going to have order-of-magnitude effects on caloric intake—seems like a much harder problem.
I can’t seen any obvious ways to do it, other than by requiring significant user input, and that would rather negate any benefits that a passive, low effort tracker had.
Am I missing something here?
(Was it a “beep to remind you not to snack” device, rather than a calorie tracker?)
It didn’t track calories. It tracked bites. The problem we were attacking was eating awareness and frequency. It might’ve been possible to track food types too but we didn’t get that far.
(Was it a “beep to remind you not to snack” device, rather than a calorie tracker?)
Yes.
Even a tool like this was useful enough that people repeatedly and independently, on their own initiative, asked us to build it for them. They were all from the same demographic: women, often stay-at-home, between the ages of 30 and 50. Their problem, as they saw it, wasn’t eating calorie-dense food. It was frequent unconscious snacking.
How did this system actually track calories? Detecting that the user is consuming food seems like a fairly solvable problem; tracking what they’re eating—which is going to have order-of-magnitude effects on caloric intake—seems like a much harder problem.
I can’t seen any obvious ways to do it, other than by requiring significant user input, and that would rather negate any benefits that a passive, low effort tracker had.
Am I missing something here?
(Was it a “beep to remind you not to snack” device, rather than a calorie tracker?)
It didn’t track calories. It tracked bites. The problem we were attacking was eating awareness and frequency. It might’ve been possible to track food types too but we didn’t get that far.
Yes.
Even a tool like this was useful enough that people repeatedly and independently, on their own initiative, asked us to build it for them. They were all from the same demographic: women, often stay-at-home, between the ages of 30 and 50. Their problem, as they saw it, wasn’t eating calorie-dense food. It was frequent unconscious snacking.
I read it as “beep to remind you to log what you’re eating”.