SmartPlate uses cameras and sensors to determine your dinner’s nutritional value

By Jenny McGrath May 4, 2015

What’s for dinner tonight? Let’s say you’re making spaghetti, but you’re also mindful of your diet and don’t want to overdo it on the carbs. The back of the box tells you how many carbohydrates are in a serving of pasta, but short of counting out the straws and adding the right amount to the pot, there’s not an easy way to tell how much you’re consuming when you’re heaping it on your plate.

There are scales, of course — even smart ones. But if you’re making a salad, you have to manually add each ingredient to the accompanying app to get a full look at the nutrition information of the whole dish. To make the process of getting an accurate picture of what you’re eating, Fitly decided to embed cameras and sensors in its SmartPlate.

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In order to tell what’s on your plate, and how much, the plate is divided into three sections and has three tiny cameras and weight sensors; using image recognition and the weight information, the SmartPlate scans the USDA’s 8,000-item database, as well as a database of SKUs and restaurant meals. The algorithm can already tell the difference between regular and whole wheat pasta, without you having to tell it, though you’ll have the option of nixing its suggestion via the smartphone app should its analysis be off. Sadly, smoothie drinkers are out of luck, as there’s no accompanying smart cup, yet.

It seems pretty automatic, but we imagine you’ll still have to use the app a bit. Four-cheese spaghetti sauce is going to a very different nutritional makeup than your standard marinara, after all. While the SmartPlate’s Kickstarter page states it’s not microwave-safe, it doesn’t say anything about how you get the thing clean, so we imagine you’d be hand-washing it after every use.

Hungry for more insight into what you’re eating? Early birds can get a $100 discount off the $199 plate, which Fitly hopes will ship in June 2016.

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