Princeton: A new mobile phone based dietary assessment tool for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Genes and Environment and Health Initiative (GEI) has been developed by Sarnoff Corporation and Viocare Technologies.
The tool, called the Mobile Food Intake Visualisation and Voice Recogniser (FIVR), uses a mobile phone to help measure a meal's nutritional content.
The innovative system uses a combination of photographs and speech recognition to identify the food and produce an estimate of the calories an individual will be consuming. FIVR system will also be able to categorise a user's eating habits.
“This exciting technology combines Sarnoff’s industry-leading vision processing expertise with Viocare’s pioneering mobile food tracking capabilities,” said Rick Weiss, president of Viocare Technologies.
“Together, Sarnoff and Viocare are able to deliver a system that vastly improves the administration of nutritional studies while offering dieters a simple yet revolutionary way to track the content of the food they eat”, he said.
Using a series of questions, FIVR will both recognise foods a user commonly eats, such as popcorn, and will also identify habits specific to that food, such as adding butter.
“In the past nutritional studies have relied on onerous questionnaires, food diaries, or a large staff of dedicated surveyors. By leveraging Sarnoff and Viocare’s extensive experience developing advanced medical technologies, FIVR eases that burden, allowing studies to receive more accurate, timely, and cost effective data”, said Dr. Don Newsome, Sarnoff’s President and Chief Executive Officer.
GEI helps determine environmental components and genetic roots of common diseases. As part of that mission, it invests in innovative new technologies to measure environmental factors such as dietary intake to determine individuals' biological response.
Source: i4d and Business Wire
|
