Saturday, April 9, 2011

I've always wondered how many calories are in my telephone.

They have an app for everything these days, don't they?

So I was reading Redmond Pie yesterday and came across an interesting article about an iOS app. The app, dubbed "Meal Snap," is able to estimate your calorie intake from pictures you take of the food you eat. DailyBurn, the company behind Meal Snap didn't give out much information in regards to how this app actually works other then the four steps listed below.

How Meal Snap Works:
1. Snap a photo of your meal.
2. Add a descriptive caption, if you are so inclined.
3. Let the system auto-magically detect the nutritional breakdown.
4. Keep track of your meals & progress over time.

This seemed to be a nifty little tool to have so I went ahead and got it to test it out. The app has a very nice looking, easy to use interface. There is a scrolling bar on the left side of the screen that allows you to scroll through previous days/months to see what you ate in the past and how many estimated calories you consumed on a day to day basis. When snapping your picture, you have the options of providing a brief description of your meal, as well as providing the location to which the meal was consumed at (via. the iDevice's location service).
Now one question you may have is "how accurate is this app?"

Well, based on the initial two pictures that I snapped, I'd say it is actually pretty accurate. The app guessed the number calories in a cup of hot chocolate as between 103 and 155 and the number of calories in 4 butter cookies as between 115 and 173. When I compared these results to the official nutrition facts listing, I saw that the number of calories for both of the two items I consumed fell in between the range of calories that the Meal Snap app estimated.

Nutrition facts of Hot Chocolate
Nutrition Facts of Butter Cookies

One thing that I don't like about this app is that you must be connected to the internet in order for it to work. This isn't much of a problem for iPhone owners who have a data plan, but I actually have an iPod touch, so for the majority of the foods I eat, I won't be able to know the amount calories they contain until I find a place with a WiFi connection.

So me, being the clever little genius that I am, decided to snap photos of a bunch of random objects to see how many calories the app would estimate that they would have. Apparently, my telephone has between 131 and 197 calories. That information will definitely come in handy for when I have run out of food and have only my telephone left to eat.

(edit: after further testing of the app, I found that if you do not add your own description of what the object is and let the device try to identify it itself, it will label it as "Not Food." I actually retook a picture of my telephone without adding the description myself and this time it was labeled as "Not Food" and said it had 0 calories. I assume that if you choose to not label the food yourself  then the picture of the food is actually sent to a human who gives the food its label.)

A user on the official app store page for the Meal Snap app wrote the following:
I doubt this information is true though seeing as how each of the pictures I snapped received a calorie intake estimate within 30 seconds of me taking the picture. If it is true, however, then that is definitely not a good thing for me, seeing as how I actually snapped a picture of my shit in the toilet bowl to see how many calories it was (Sorry if you saw that picture; it was pretty disgusting).

All in all, I'd say this is a pretty awesome app to have. It would sure come in handy in a situation where the nutritional facts for the food you are about to eat isn't readily available (i.e. in a restaurant setting). Is it worth $2.99 though? Hmm... that's for you to decide.

1 Comment:

Jeffrey-sama said... [Reply]

Why so much comedy? o_o

Anyways, there's a link on my blog that directs to your blog. Hopefully, that will generate a few views.

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