The most popular search engine on the internet, Google has announced recently that it’s working on developing state-of-the-art robots that will analyze how many calories people are consuming and how much food there is on a plate.
Google hopes that the new technology will help people be more careful with what they’re eating, especially if they are on a diet and want to restrict the amount of food they consume daily.
Although there are numerous apps that were designed to do just that, they require the user to manually enter the nutritional info or to scan the package of the product to tell them how many calories they’re about to consume.
But the new Google calorie counting robots called Im2Calories use a technology that helps them recognize the food items individually, measure them in relation to the plate, and finally converting them into calories.
Google said that the pictures of the food items don’t have to be at a high resolution or specially taken.
The Im2Calories robots can analyze the food using only Instagram pics.
This is not the first time Google develops robots that can recognize different things looking at photos. Some of these robots are used on the recently-released Google Photos app.
Competing companies like Flickr have also released similar recognizing technology, a tool called “machine learning”, which are special computer designed to think and understand things just like humans do.
This means that the technology can get better gradually, as humans tell it when it’ right or wrong.
Machine learning means that the developers do not have to spend time and tell the computers how to recognize things; the users do that for them.
Google said that the robots don’t even have to be extremely accurate from the beginning. They will get better in time as the users correct them.
But some experts in nutrition argue that counting calories alone is not enough for people to have a healthy diet.
They also believe that eating less calories and avoiding fat foods is not the best approach.
What we eat is extremely important for our health. Just counting the calories will not matter that much unless we look at the types of calories we’re consuming.
Others argue that some diet apps are using food labels, which are not very accurate.
Google has already filed a patent for its Im2Calories technology but it didn’t say anything about the official release date.
Image Source: flickr
