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Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

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Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#11

Post by dalore »

endtime wrote: post #8

>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 t…

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.

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#12

Post by 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.

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#14

Post by 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.

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#16

Post by warwick »

endtime wrote: post #8

>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 t…

Perhaps if anything that wasn't just a 'wrapper match' could be farmed out to Mechanical Turk. You could charge a monthly fee high enough to cover the identification, and increase your profit margin as your recognition gets better.

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#17

Post by eogas »

siglesias wrote: post #5

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 li…

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?

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#18

Post by Locke1689 »

dalore wrote: post #11
endtime wrote: post #8

>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 t…

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…

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

That could work, except it's completely and awfully wrong. Don't they teach physics anymore?

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#19

Post by peregrine »

sahillavingia wrote: post #15

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

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)

Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App

#20

Post by endtime »

dalore wrote: post #11
endtime wrote: post #8

>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 t…

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…

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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