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261 points david927 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.496s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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heltale ◴[] No.43158146[source]
I've recently been prototyping a mobile application to track your food nutrition. The key feature lies in auto-detecting the food based on a given image, and breaking it down into it's ingredients and then into it's macros.

Existing apps such as MyFitnessPal and HealthifyMe fall into two ends of the spectrum where you either need to add ingredients one by one, or your food is logged with a standard macro count where you cannot change the ingredients used.

Weit ideally provides a seamless experience in taking a picture to retrieving ingredients to retrieving macros per ingredient. Once that's sorted, food tracking should be granular enough to build intelligence around it to improve one's diet based on their requirement.

Honestly, I used to constantly struggle with the realisation that none of my ideas are unique and whenever I see someone having built something similar, I feel like I'm wasting my time. I'm getting better at dealing with it now though.

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1. asdev ◴[] No.43161990[source]
this idea has been rinsed and repeated many times already. unless you're going to include manual input in addition to the image recognition, it will be highly inaccurate
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2. heltale ◴[] No.43164056[source]
Oh yeah, manual input is going to be a big part of it. The system should ideally try to map the image to a standard recipe with the ingredients and then hand over control to the user to make any modifications they like.

Computing the nutrients from the ingredients should be reasonably accurate post this because that has a direct mapping in the USDA FoodCentral dataset.