If you're tired of manually logging your meals and counting calories on various health apps, you might want to check out HealthifyMe's latest feature: Snap. Snap is a food recognition system that uses artificial intelligence to identify and track your food intake from photos. You don't even need to open the app to use it. Just snap a photo of your plate from your phone's lock screen and let Snap do the rest. Snap is the world's first 'Fire & Forget' food recognition system, according to HealthifyMe, an Indian AI health and fitness app. It aims to make nutrition tracking as easy and unobtrusive as possible, by using computer vision AI to detect the food items, their quantities, portion sizes, and even micronutrients in your photos. Snap then automatically logs the meal details in your HealthifyMe app, where you can review them later. Indian food is hard to get right for AI thanks to its sheer diversity but HealthifyMe claims Snap has been trained to recognise those easily. It can identify the most popular dishes from across the country, as well as packaged foods and beverages commonly found on supermarket shelves. Of course, dishes like pasta, burgers and salad are also covered. The health app plans to expand Snap's capabilities to other markets, such as the US, UK and Middle East, in the coming months. Since the app automatically logs data by scanning your gallery for pictures of food, it does raise some concerns. But HealthifyMe assures privacy, saying that non-food photos are filtered out by a smaller AI model on your phone and never leave your device. Only photos of food reach the company’s servers, where they are processed by larger and more sophisticated AI models. HealthifyMe does promise a 75% accuracy rate but you can always edit or delete your meal logs if you find any errors or omissions. Snap gives you a starting point to track your nutrition, which can help you become more aware of your eating patterns and make healthier choices. Food identification isn’t as hard as detecting the amount of food, like for instance, the number of rotis on a plate. If HealthifyMe manages to get that right and logs calories with decent accuracy, the feature can prove to be a game-changer for nutrition tracking, making it almost as effortless as step tracking. If you want to try out the Snap feature for yourself, download the HealthifyMe app from the App Store or Google Play and start snapping away.
