An AI-powered function that can automatically identify Indian food from photos for calorie intake logging has been developed by Indian health and wellness firm HealthifyMe, making it easier for customers to keep track of their meal intake.
Keeping track of Indian food through photos is difficult because there are so many different kinds of the cuisine. Additionally, a number of individuals eat from a plate known as a “Thaali” in Hindi, which has varied servings of different foods. Along with portion sizes, all of that needs to be recognized by a model.
Snap, the newest tool from HealthifyMe, allows users to snap photos of their meals and attempts to identify food ingredients that are caught in the frame. As an alternative, users can provide the app access to their gallery, and it will automatically scan images of food. Later on, users can review those images and the food items they contain. This enables users to utilize their cameras to snap images, then handle the calorie tracking at a later time.
Regarding privacy, the manufacturer claims that the device’s model recognizes images of food and forwards them to servers so that they can identify a particular meal. Additionally, the business states that their gallery-based model performs better than the alternative of taking images of your meal for recognition since it has more time to identify food items.
When the model recognizes that an image contains numerous objects, Snap will prompt you to tap on an item to include it in your calorie monitoring. An movable rectangular box will be visible to users so they can focus on various objects.
Tushar Vashisht, co-founder and CEO of HealthifyMe, told TechCrunch that the company’s major use case for its free users is still tracking food, having originated as a food-tracking app almost 11 years ago.
Food tracking might be challenging at times because you have to physically type the food log and remember to log it. Therefore, we thought that a tool like Snap would help us enhance engagement and retention,” he said.
Over the years, the startup had attempted to incorporate image-based food recognition, according to Vashisht, but it was made easier to make Snap by the development of more advanced generative AI models. According to the business, the feature is trained to identify 150,000 different Indian cuisine products at the moment.
HealthifyMe states that it can automatically identify food with 60–70% accuracy. According to the business, consumers will still receive suggestions about what the food item might be even if the model is unable to identify it accurately. Employees who work for the company as reviewers examine and rectify incorrect recognitions. In order to enhance the model, users can also manually identify these incorrectly identified images. Vashisht declared his confidence in the model’s accuracy exceeding 80% within the upcoming month.
Notably, other businesses are also pursuing AI-powered food detection, so HealthifyMe is not the only player in the game. This capability will be made available by Samsung Food, the company’s meal planning platform, early in 2019. Working on the same issue, Wade Norris, a former Google Lens employee, and his firm Snapcalorie have funding from Accel, Y Combinator, and Index Ventures.
HealthifyMe plans to expand its food logging options over the following few weeks. Users may now send photos to HealthifyMe WhatsApp or tag other users on X with food-related images thanks to the advent of Snap. In addition to enhancing its current AI-powered assistant Ria, the company is developing a voice input function.
HealthifyMe offers a basic premium service that starts at $4.80 (₹399) per month and gives users access to an AI-powered fitness and nutrition assistant, meal planning, and healthy recipes. The company has raised over $130 million in capital to date from investors like LeapFrog Ventures and Khosla Ventures. Additionally, the company provides pro-paid subscriptions with features including an AI-based meal planner, fitness and nutrition coaches, and a smart scale, starting at $48 a month (₹4,000).
More advantages, such repeated doctor consultations, metabolic panel testing, and continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices, are included in the upper tiers of the Pro plans. According to the company, roughly 40% of its over 200,000 clients pay for the Pro plan.
HealthifyMe and Swiggy, an Indian food delivery business, collaborated in 2020 to select restaurants and meals that promote health. The business has already begun discussions with a number of grocery and food delivery providers that may benefit from its technology.
