Foodvisor App Uses Deep Learning to Monitor & Maintain Your Diet

Foodvisor, a startup that launched its new AI-based app in France in 2018 is about to change the manner in which you track and keep your diet plans. As TechCrunch explains, the Foodvisor app “helps you log everything you eat in order to lose weight, follow a diet or get healthier.” The users are also given the ability to input additional data by capturing a photo of the food you are about to eat.

The app works by using deep learning “to enable image recognition to detect what you’re about to eat. In addition to identifying the type of food, the app tries to estimate the weight of each item.” Using autofocus data, it also makes an evaluation of the distance between the plate of food and the phone it is on.

Foodvisor also allows its users to manually correct any data before the meal is logged in. For many people tracking their diet nutrition trackers turn out to be too demanding, and the idea behind Foodvisor is to make “the data entry process as seamless as possible.”

Finally, it produces a list of nutrition facts about what has just been consumed –  calories, proteins, carbs, fats, fibers, and other essential information. The users can then set their own goals, log their nutritional activities and monitor their progress.

The app itself is free to use, but it also offers a premium subscription that varies between $5 and $10. These subscriptions offer more analysis and diet plans, but the main feature  of these plans being “that you can chat with a registered dietitian/nutritionist directly in the app.”

So far, Foodvisor was able to gather 1.8 million downloads and is available on IOS and Android systems in French, English, German and Spanish, and has raised $1.5 million so far (€1.4 million). Co-founder and CMO Aurore Tran says the company has “enriched [its] database to better target the American market.”

The trend of using AI systems in food apps was started back in 2015 when Google started developing its Im2Calories,  a system that counted calories based on Instagram photos. It was followed, as The Daily Meal reported, “researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Qatar Computing Research Institute created Pic2Recipe, an app that uses artificial intelligence to predict ingredients and suggests similar recipes based on looking at a picture of food.”

The same team is still trying to “improve the system to understand images of food in more detail, including identifying cooking and preparation methods. They are also interested in recommending recipes based on dietary preferences and available ingredients.”

But as Ai capabilities develop, it seems that Foodvisor took the idea one step further.