In the race towards personalizing health and wellness, inventors have been constantly pushing boundaries. No longer do we only have to depend on subjective self-reporting methods or intensive manual tracking for managing our diet. A patent titled "Devices, Systems, and Methods, including Augmented Reality (AR) Eyewear, for Estimating Food Consumption and Providing Nutritional Coaching" (US20230335253A1) tries to combat this.
This patent addresses a simple, yet potent issue - the difficulty in automatically detecting and identifying eating habits of a person for managing diet. Today, accurate dietary self-reporting is a challenge. People often forget the exact portions they ate or miss out on documenting snack times altogether. Also, manually clicking pictures of every meal before eating can be labor-intensive and embarrassing, especially in social situations.
Existing solutions involve devices that continuously take pictures of a person's food intake, which might lead to privacy concerns. These solutions don't differentiate between a person’s individual plate and shared platters, making it difficult to estimate personal intake accurately. Also, it's a challenge to track what happens when a person doesn't eat all of the food on their plate.
The innovative molding of technology proposed by this patent - a coupling of wearable gadgets and augmented reality - promises to solve these problems. The invention, applied on wearable glasses, uses sensors to detect when a person starts eating. It then activates one or more cameras to begin capturing images of the person’s mouth and the food, without manual intervention.
So, imagine this - you're at a family gathering, engrossed in conversation, and reach out for your third slice of pizza. The moment you take a bite, your glasses identify that you've started eating. The embedded cameras instantly start capturing images. The device accurately estimates what and how much you're eating, and later provides you feedback and tips for better eating habits. Sounds almost like having a personal nutritionist in your glasses, doesn't it?
This technological breakthrough has the immense potential to revolutionize the current landscape of dietary intake management. Not only will it increase the accuracy of intake-monitoring, but also reduce the dependency on memory and manual input. A system like this could motivate more people to proactively manage their diet, leading to better health outcomes worldwide.
P.S. - While this invention holds promise, it's important to remember patents don't always end up as marketable products. The feasibility of commercial production, user acceptance and legal permissions play a significant role in the transition from a patent to a widely available product.