| [February 14, 2012] |
 |
Smartphone App Could Help Health and Diet Conscious Track Caloric Intake by Taking a Picture
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. --(Business Wire)--
A picture can be worth a thousand calories or 800 or 1,800 through a new
smartphone application being developed at Purdue University (News - Alert) to help the
health and diet conscious track their caloric intake by taking a picture
of their food.
The application counts more than calories. It also provides information
on the amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates in food through the Technology
Assisted Dietary Assessment system, or TADA,
being developed by Purdue's College of Health and Human Sciences and
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
"Our goal is to allow people to record their food intake and hep
individuals with health challenges like diabetes understand what they're
eating and make healthier choices," said Carol Boushey, who led the
development team while a professor in Purdue's College of Health and
Human Sciences.
Boushey, who is now an adjunct professor at Purdue and director of the
University of Hawaii Cancer Center's Nutrition Support Shared Resource,
said the application's development entailed an interdisciplinary
approach.
Edward J. Delp, the Charles William Harrison Distinguished Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, oversaw the imaging software
development that automatically identifies the foods in the images.
"We have excellent methods to measure physical activity but we don't
have a good way to measure what we consume," Delp said. "It's one thing
for someone to type in a list of the food they've consumed and determine
its nutritional value, but another to just take an image of a plate of
food and use an application to identify the type of food, the amount of
food and nutritional value."
Martin Okos, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological
Engineering, oversaw the food density application.
"The density of food is needed to convert the volume of food consumed to
gram weight so that the app can determine nutritional value," Okos said.
Bruce A. Craig, professor and director of the statistical consulting
service for Purdue's College of Science Department of Statistics, is
also involved with the project. Some funding for the project came from
the National Institutes of Health.
The patented application is being commercialized through Purdue's
Office of Technology Commercialization. Contact Michael Halbrook at
765-588-3483, mlhalbrook@prf.org
for information.
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