There's currently hundreds of applications and wearables that connect consumers to the Internet and make health, fitness, and nutrition information available almost anywhere at any time. The idea has been pretty much covered but one company in Philadelphia ventured into one area that with bring an additional device on a household's plate rack.
Yes, it's a plate that could tell you the nutritional information the food that you put on it.
Fitly Inc. has came up with the SmartPlate, which is basically a plate with three portions and is equipped with digital cameras, sensors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth making it the first connected plate.
The SmartPlate has a "squircle" (one part square, one part circle) that gives an illusion of a large plate but only has a 10-inch diameter surface. The center of the plate is where the cameras are located, and the sensors, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are sandwiched within the plate itself.
What SmartPlate does is it helps you weigh, identify, and record what you eat so you don't have to manually enter the details about your next meal. And since it creates a sort of database of your previous meals, you can easily look back what you've eaten in the past.
It also helps you in controlling portions of the food you eat which then helps in managing your weight. Although all of these features can be fully optimized when it is interconnected with other health and fitness applications.
In a video at the SmartPlate's Kickstarter page, Fitly Inc.'s CEO Anthony Ortiz presented a demo of the product which emulated the largest partition of the plate using a separate test bed with sensors and the camera of an Android smartphone.
Once the test bed was connected to the phone (via Bluetooth), the apple placed on top of it was weighed. The phone's camera automatically took a picture of the apple and information is analyzed on the cloud using the FDA's database.
The information is sent back to the SmartPlate's app which displayed its weight, the calories, carbs, protein, sugar, etc.
It seems that the working prototype is dishwasher safe, but definitely not microwavable, except for the lid that comes with it.
Fitly plans to ship the SmartPlate by June 2016 which will retail for $199 but for early birds who could get it at its Kickstarter campaign page by making a pledge of $99. The company is aiming for $100,000 backing for production to start.
