In our era of fitness trackers and smartwatches, it’s easier than ever to focus on self-improvement. One of the most popular ways that people are taking charge of their health is calorie counting, which often equates to recording meals and making informed decisions about what to eat and not eat.
But the process isn’t always so clear-cut. Sure, there’s nutrition facts on many packaged foods, but what about items from restaurants, or generic items like eggs, or even fresh-baked bread from your local bakery? While existing apps may have detailed databases of millions of food products, they often disagree on exactly what’s in what you’re eating. And that’s not even mentioning the effort it takes to manually log your meals, which often is enough to get people to quit logging.
If you’ve been trying to take charge of your health, but want a different way to record and analyze the meals you’re eating, this high-tech app might be just what you’re looking for. Using artificial intelligence (AI), it’s able to scan what’s on your plate right through your phone’s camera and give you detailed information. Read on for more details on this groundbreaking nutritional app.
Foodvisor is all gain, no pain
Foodvisor is a free app available on both iOS and Android that allows users to journal their dietary habits in a totally new way.
Unlike many of its competitors, Foodvisor doesn’t simply rely on the user to accurately record food, calories and macronutrients. Instead, it uses cutting-edge AI and machine learning technologies to recognize foods and packaging by sight. This means all you need to do to get your tracking on is snap a picture. Foodvisor takes care of the rest.
Interestingly, the developers of Foodvisor have engineering backgrounds rather than nutrition or fitness. This means they used their expertise to perfect their tracking technology while outsourcing the fitness coaching and eating advice to real dietitians (which you can even have access to with a premium subscription of $60 for a year, or $21 for 3 months)
To bring you our patented trusted advice here at Komando.com, we put the application through two real-world performance tests so we could honestly report what we found. Needless to say, we were quite impressed with the results — particularly with the camera and tracking features.
Dieting with the help of AI
When you first boot up the app, Foodvisor has you create a personalized profile of yourself to best determine your dietary needs. You’ll input your height and weight, along with your lifestyle and activity level. What follows next is a complete breakdown of your daily calorie and nutrient allotment, which will help you make smarter choices of what to eat or not eat.
Once your profile is set up, you can begin scanning to your heart’s content. We scanned two items using the two types of camera features the app comes with (barcode and AI camera). The first item, a Pop-Tart, had its barcode scanned to bring us information on calories, carbs and fat content. A solid start, to be sure.
Here’s where the technology gets crazy though. As part of our test, we took a plain hard-boiled egg and placed it on to a white plate to try and challenge the camera a little.
Not only was the egg spotted, but it was also identified unusually fast considering how well it blended in with its backdrop. And just like with the Pop-Tart, we were treated to full nutritional information, as well as a ranking from Foodvisor on the quality of the item (in the egg’s case, it gets a VERY GOOD ranking).
And just like that, our caloric allowance dropped and our nutritional levels rose. This almost makes dieting like a game, except this time, you don’t just win for glory — you end up with a healthier body.
Foodvisor is available for free on both Google Play and the iOS App Store.
You can sign up for the Premium version, which gives you full access to recipes, diet plans and even personalized advice from the apps in house dietitians. But you don’t have to. You can stick with the free version if you choose.
It’s a great way to start taking your health seriously and works great with calorie-burning readouts from your Fitbit or Apple Watch.
And speaking of which, there’s an Apple Watch version of the app as well. Delicious!
