Lose It! Launches Snap It to Let Users Count Calories in Food Photos
Lose It!, a Boston-based weight loss app, has launched a new beta feature called Snap It. This feature allows users to take photos of their meals and snacks and have the app automatically log them and estimate their calorie counts. Users can simply open the app, select a meal type, take a photo of their food, and submit it to Snap It. The app will then analyze the photo and provide a few best guesses as to what food is in the image. Users can then confirm the food identified and add more details, such as the type of rice or specific ingredients in a sushi roll.
Snap It is built on a neural network that learns and improves over time, becoming better at identifying foods and their portions. The app utilizes the Food 101 dataset, which contains 101,000 images of 101 different food categories. Lose It! claims that Snap It beta already achieves 87.3% to 97.1% accuracy within that dataset, and its accuracy is expected to increase as more users contribute images and descriptions.
While logging meals with photos is common on social media, Lose It! aims to provide accurate calorie assessments and nutritional information to help users improve their diets. The company’s goal is to make understanding your diet as simple as tracking your activity with a Fitbit.
