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I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal.

I would pay something like $5 per day for this if it was a real person who looks at my photos, categorizes them accurately, and enters them into MyFitnessPal. I won't trust an AI until it has a massive database and a million users. Until then, it's just not going to work well enough. You also need to convince users why they should use your app, instead of MyFitnessPal (which already has a massive database, including barcodes.)

subcosmos 10y ago
I have considered something like this as a business model, although I was thinking of nutrition coaching instead of mere logging itself, but thats actually a really great idea.
- jqueryin 10y ago
  There's nothing stopping you from having a human aspect do the training and verification behind the scenes. It's how companies such as Expensify were able to handle their receipt OCR gracefully for such a wide variety of invoices and receipts. I'd err on the side of saying this is a more palpable sales approach to selling it as AI. Letting your customers know that while AI is running the show, things are being monitored closely and fixed by real people when misclassifications arise.
  - subcosmos 10y ago
    Ive been running the underlying nonprofit (infino.me) for about 3 years with this ambition to study gene-exercise-nutrition interactions, with very little interest in making any money at it. But this thought of having a paid service for people who don't want to go through the asspain of logging .... this does have me intrigued. Everyone tells me they want an effortless meal logging app ... and photo snaps might be the closest we can get short of having something like google glass persistently monitor intake.
- kbenson 10y ago
  I wouldn't pay $5 a day. I would pay $30 a month. Mechanical turk, with a note that the picture needs to contain some sort of scale (and a request to manually scale the item if you didn't include one and it's not obvious), would probably take you pretty far.
- dvirsky 10y ago
  I remember there was an app like that a couple of years ago, that didn't really take off. Don't remember the name or story.
HamSession 10y ago
I agree with your suggestions for human assessment because of problem posed by food calories varying significantly due to different preparations. Take for example soda, if I gave you a picture of soda in a glass could you tell it was diet or regular? You might scoff at such an edge case but it quickly becomes more common when looking into food perpetration techniques. This is why caloric estimation is a really difficult and causes restaurants to not list their calories as the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts. All these solutions are common as people want a signal to tell them to stop eating, but these are insufficient as people will simply ignore it due to hunger cravings (as happens on diets). Any nutritionist service in addition to detailing calories would need to incentive the patient to recognize the need to lose weight or setup a helpline.
- tryitnow 10y ago
  How is that " the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts"? That seems to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    Cooking changes the caloric content of food. Not all of every ingredient gets all the way to the diner plate. Biology is not thermodynamics. Humans are not perfect combustion engines.
  - alphydan 10y ago
    He may be talking about cooking. This could involve chemical reactions, or facilitate / slow the absorption of nutrients, therefore changing the effective caloric intake from various ingredients. Thermodynamics should add up once you account for heating, cooling, evaporation, enzymes, waste, etc
- gohrt 10y ago
  > causes restaurants to not list their calories as the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts. In my area, restaurants list the calories for each menu item, exactly to the extent required by law (chain restaurants are required to public calorie counts), plus some promotional "under 500 calories" or what-have-you for diet-targeting places.
logn 10y ago
It would be difficult to account properly for ingredients such as butter and oil which are hard to see in a finished dish and drastically affect the calories. But people would probably still pay as long as it's a good faith attempt, since they can't necessarily do better themselves, so it would be just as accurate and save time. And with geolocation, you could start to figure out where people are and then you'd know exactly the calories if they're at a chain restaurant.
- subcosmos 10y ago
  Yup! The app as it stands does geolocation and factors this into account for nutrition lookups, but I could certainly do this automatically without requiring a check in.
- deleted 10y ago
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deleted 10y ago
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a_small_island 10y ago
Impossible. How can someone tell whether you cooked with butter and oil, for instance?
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Sending notes with the image maybe? Combined with a clear estimate-based response it might be okay. For me I would be ok with knowing weather the meal was in the 500 or 800 range.

subcosmos 10y ago

I have considered something like this as a business model, although I was thinking of nutrition coaching instead of mere logging itself, but thats actually a really great idea.

jqueryin 10y ago
There's nothing stopping you from having a human aspect do the training and verification behind the scenes. It's how companies such as Expensify were able to handle their receipt OCR gracefully for such a wide variety of invoices and receipts. I'd err on the side of saying this is a more palpable sales approach to selling it as AI. Letting your customers know that while AI is running the show, things are being monitored closely and fixed by real people when misclassifications arise.
- subcosmos 10y ago
  Ive been running the underlying nonprofit (infino.me) for about 3 years with this ambition to study gene-exercise-nutrition interactions, with very little interest in making any money at it. But this thought of having a paid service for people who don't want to go through the asspain of logging .... this does have me intrigued. Everyone tells me they want an effortless meal logging app ... and photo snaps might be the closest we can get short of having something like google glass persistently monitor intake.
kbenson 10y ago
I wouldn't pay $5 a day. I would pay $30 a month. Mechanical turk, with a note that the picture needs to contain some sort of scale (and a request to manually scale the item if you didn't include one and it's not obvious), would probably take you pretty far.
dvirsky 10y ago
I remember there was an app like that a couple of years ago, that didn't really take off. Don't remember the name or story.

HamSession 10y ago

I agree with your suggestions for human assessment because of problem posed by food calories varying significantly due to different preparations. Take for example soda, if I gave you a picture of soda in a glass could you tell it was diet or regular? You might scoff at such an edge case but it quickly becomes more common when looking into food perpetration techniques. This is why caloric estimation is a really difficult and causes restaurants to not list their calories as the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts. All these solutions are common as people want a signal to tell them to stop eating, but these are insufficient as people will simply ignore it due to hunger cravings (as happens on diets). Any nutritionist service in addition to detailing calories would need to incentive the patient to recognize the need to lose weight or setup a helpline.

tryitnow 10y ago
How is that " the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts"? That seems to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Cooking changes the caloric content of food. Not all of every ingredient gets all the way to the diner plate. Biology is not thermodynamics. Humans are not perfect combustion engines.
- alphydan 10y ago
  He may be talking about cooking. This could involve chemical reactions, or facilitate / slow the absorption of nutrients, therefore changing the effective caloric intake from various ingredients. Thermodynamics should add up once you account for heating, cooling, evaporation, enzymes, waste, etc
gohrt 10y ago
> causes restaurants to not list their calories as the calories of a meal do not equal the sum of it's parts. In my area, restaurants list the calories for each menu item, exactly to the extent required by law (chain restaurants are required to public calorie counts), plus some promotional "under 500 calories" or what-have-you for diet-targeting places.

logn 10y ago

It would be difficult to account properly for ingredients such as butter and oil which are hard to see in a finished dish and drastically affect the calories. But people would probably still pay as long as it's a good faith attempt, since they can't necessarily do better themselves, so it would be just as accurate and save time. And with geolocation, you could start to figure out where people are and then you'd know exactly the calories if they're at a chain restaurant.

subcosmos 10y ago
Yup! The app as it stands does geolocation and factors this into account for nutrition lookups, but I could certainly do this automatically without requiring a check in.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

a_small_island 10y ago

Impossible. How can someone tell whether you cooked with butter and oil, for instance?

wingerlang 10y ago
Sending notes with the image maybe? Combined with a clear estimate-based response it might be okay. For me I would be ok with knowing weather the meal was in the 500 or 800 range.