Someone just started working on Gourmet Goggles in their 20 percent time.
Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#32Perhaps 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?
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#33I'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.
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.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#34Sort of already exists... only in the other direction.
http://www.ideaconnection.com/blog/2009/04/japanesetoilet-an...
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#35This 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 ver…
> 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 reco…
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.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#36I 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 availab…
Good idea, except roughly 40% of peoples' food budgets are spent on food outside of the home.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#37I'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.
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.
There are no apps that will save you from that kind of decision.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#38If this ever becomes popular, I expect orthorexia rates to soar.
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 reco…
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.
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".
Re: Scott Adams: The Ultimate Food and Exercise App
#40I 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 availab…
Good idea, except roughly 40% of peoples' food budgets are spent on food outside of the home.
Supermarkets are cheaper than eating out.