Plate that counts calories
A WONKY plastic dish that looks as if it might carry Han Solo’s television dinners could be the latest solution to over-eating.
Claimed by its inventors to be the world’s first ‘‘intelligent plate’’, the SmartPlate proposes to count every calorie that is placed on it.
Hidden in its sides are three digital cameras that photograph the diner’s food. These pictures are relayed over wi-fi or Bluetooth to a mobile device, which sends them for comparison with a large bank of images to determine what is in the meal, using a similar technology to facial recognition cameras.
A scale concealed in the body of the plate weighs the food and matches it against the database to calculate how much energy it contains. Over time, the machine will ‘‘learn’’ to get better and better at telling pink lady from braeburn apples or working out whether you have put ghee in your lamb Rogan josh.
That, at least, is the theory. Anthony Ortiz, the founder and chief executive of Fitly, the American start-up that is developing the SmartPlate, is bullish about the plate’s perspicacity but coy about exactly how it works.
‘‘ Our proprietary foodrecognition algorithm is trained to read mixed foods as well as single food items with up to 99% accuracy in less than a second,’’ he said. ‘‘ Currently, our technology can identify things like mixed salads, rice pilaf, spaghetti with meatballs and turkey wraps.
‘‘ SmartPlate is like a newborn that is starting to see for the first time. Once it learns or is taught what the objects are, it then starts to classify each item or combination of food items for the future.
‘‘ In fact, she – she’s a she – already knows the difference between white pasta with sauce and wholemeal pasta with sauce, and she will get smarter over time. As more people start to use it, she’ll learn even the more subtle nuances between more complex mixtures of food, which are invisible to the human eye.’’
Fitly is raising money for the SmartPlate through Kickstarter, the crowd-funding website, and hopes to sell its product for dollars 199 in the United States, and in Europe.