New AI System Can Watch What You Eat To Calculate Your Calorie Consumption

We all know how there are apps that let you snap a picture of your meal and calculate the calories. Well, hold onto your forks and spoons because researchers at the University of Waterloo are taking it to the next level! According to Sky News, they’re working on AI that can monitor every bite you take to track your calorie intake. Yes, you read that right! This high-tech system will even work with forks and chopsticks! Can you imagine your utensils keeping tabs on your every munch? Well, the future is here!

This new technology evaluates the nutritional value of your diet by analysing videos of you chowing down! “We’re shifting towards using those large language models like ChatGPT […] to understand what is in the food or maybe ask a basic question [like] ‘is this chicken?” said Yuhao Chen at the University of Waterloo in Canada to New Scientist, quoted Sky News.
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Talking about the benefits of this technology, Yuhao Chen adds, “A lot of the time, especially for people eating at home, the dish may not be a named dish. It may be just whatever is available in the fridge that they’ve mixed together.”

“The current […] food portion estimation algorithms assume that users take images of their meals one or two times,” say researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada. “[This] can be inconvenient and fail to capture food items that are not visible from a top-down perspective, such as ingredients submerged in a stew.”

According to the researchers, this new AI tracking system can calculate the volume of food you’re eating with just a 4.4% margin for error.
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Currently, the system doesn’t identify the food on your spoon. Trainers are teaching it how to spot what you’re eating. Once fully developed, the system should be able to recognize a wide range of foods, including those it hasn’t seen before.

About Jigyasa KakwaniJigyasa finds her solace through writing, a medium she is exploring to make the world more informed and curious with every story published. She is always up for exploring new cuisines, but her heart comes back to the comforting ghar-ka-khana.