[heltale]

I've recently been prototyping a mobile application to track your food nutrition. The key feature lies in auto-detecting the food based on a given image, and breaking it down into it's ingredients and then into it's macros.

Existing apps such as MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe fall into two ends of the spectrum where you either need to add ingredients one by one, or your food is logged with a standard macro count where you cannot change the ingredients used.

Weit ideally provides a seamless experience in taking a picture to retrieving ingredients to retrieving macros per ingredient. Once that's sorted, food tracking should be granular enough to build intelligence around it to improve one's diet based on their requirement.

Honestly, I used to constantly struggle with the realisation that none of my ideas are unique and whenever I see someone having built something similar, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm getting better at dealing with it now though.

[fraaancis]

This is exactly the app I would've wanted when I was still trying to lose weight by tracking calories, really great idea. I paid for a calorie-tracking app that couldn't do this, I think it was MyFitnessPal, and know several people currently paying for the same type of thing.

[heltale]

That's good to know!

Thanks for sharing, it feels nice to know that people actually have an interest in the concept.

[Bnjoroge]

Not sure if you are already familiar but I use Cal AI and think it does a pretty decent job. How granular do you track the macros? hard to figure out from a picture if I used some cheese or how much oil.

[heltale]

Indeed, I intend on having the user take over after identifying the food that we're working with.

The idea is to reduce the amount of redundant work (clicking a button to add a single ingredient over and over again), and rather push for minor modifications instead.

[asdev]

CalAI is a scam. It's highly inaccurate, there's no way to determine calories from a picture for a multitude of reasons

[damirbecirovic]

I invested in http://usenourish.com (a YC company) that recently launched this. If you want to work on this for them, happy to intro.

[heltale]

Just went through the company's website, and I like how well the software ties into the company's motive/direction.

I'd appreciate an intro, thanks! I could send an email, or you can find mine on my bio :D

[andy_ppp]

I thought about this too, if you need any help let me know, email in bio.

[heltale]

Thanks! I'll send you an email sometime if I make any progress on it! :D

[asdev]

this idea has been rinsed and repeated many times already. unless you're going to include manual input in addition to the image recognition, it will be highly inaccurate

[heltale]

Oh yeah, manual input is going to be a big part of it. The system should ideally try to map the image to a standard recipe with the ingredients and then hand over control to the user to make any modifications they like.

Computing the nutrients from the ingredients should be reasonably accurate post this because that has a direct mapping in the USDA FoodCentral dataset.