“A tray that tracks your food intake: A revolutionary invention for healthcare and beyond, developed by researchers at Wageningen University. From stew to a yellow knit, the tray’s sensors detect what you eat and how you eat it. But it’s not just about tracking calories, as senior researcher Guido Camps explains. Discover how this technology could help sick patients eat enough, reduce overeating, and even appear on your smartwatch. Find out why using a questionnaire for food tracking may no longer be reliable and why AI’s involvement in this field is considered both “exciting” and a little bit “scary”.”

2023-04-21 17:43:34

Do you know at the end of the day what you ate and what was in it? Chances are not. Researchers from various universities have developed a tray that keeps track of this for you. And that’s just the beginning, they say.

The invention could give healthcare a helping hand.

Stew or a yellow knit?

Senior researcher Guido Camps of Wageningen University knows exactly how such a tray works. “The tray on top is normal, but everything around it is sensors that we built to measure what people eat and how they eat it.”

A bowl of nuts, but also a stew can be recognized by a camera. The latter is now only a bit difficult, says Camps. “For the camera it looks like a yellow paste, and it looks like a stew. But we are working on that.”

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How often do you chew?

According to the researcher, it is useful to know how much food you consume in a day and what else you can eat that day. “Almost everyone struggles to maintain their weight,” he explains. “That is also a result of our food environment. There is good food for sale everywhere.”

A camera that can see 180 degrees hangs from the tray. “So it sees what’s on the tray, and you. If you hang in front of it, it registers your mouth. Then it can register what you eat,” Camps explains. “How many bites you take, how often you chew and how long it takes you.”

Questionnaire not reliable

This is especially useful for healthcare at the moment. “It helps us to ensure that sick people continue to eat enough, and that we can slow down people who eat too much,” says Camps. “We now often use a questionnaire to register what people eat, but that is not always reliable because you don’t remember everything.”

In addition, we often do not know exactly how much we eat. “A bowl of oatmeal, for example, most people don’t know how many grams that is,” says the researcher.

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AI ‘a bit exciting’

But isn’t it scary that artificial intelligence will soon know all this? “It’s quite a bit exciting,” Camps admits. “But I always say: ‘You’d rather have someone in science research this, who doesn’t want to make a profit and doesn’t sell the data, than a big tech giant. The technology will get there anyway.’

He sees that health insurers are increasingly interested in how healthy you are, because they want to take this into account in the health care premium. “I think we should think about that carefully, and we do that with ethicists and philosophers. What effect does this kind of technology have on society? We really have to pay attention to that.”

Also on smartwatch?

At the moment, the tool can mainly be used in a hospital or a rehabilitation center, where it is very important to accurately record what someone eats. But Camps also sees it appearing on smartwatches in the future. “That’s useful for at home.”

“Your watch now tells you how many calories you have burned at the end of the day. It would be ideal if it also indicated how much you ate, because it could recognize whether you are eating by your arm movement,” he expects. “We’re trying to look at that now.”