Tracking sleep, steps and workouts has become routine for many wearable users, but food intake remains surprisingly dependent on old-fashioned manual entry. ODYSS wants to close that gap with the ODYSS N1, an AI-powered dietary necklace unveiled at IFA 2026 in Berlin. The company describes it as a wearable designed to automatically understand eating behaviour, reducing the need for users to record every meal themselves.
An AI necklace that watches how you eat
Food logging apps have attracted more than 300 million registered users, according to ODYSS, but keeping up the habit over the long term has proved difficult. The company cites a 2015 CHI study from the University of Washington, which linked users’ abandonment of food logging in part to logging fatigue and social embarrassment. In other words, remembering to record every meal can eventually become yet another chore.
The N1 takes a different approach by attempting to collect dietary information passively. It uses a G-sensor and contact sensors to detect whether the necklace is being worn, while a wide-angle camera captures visual food cues and hand-to-mouth movements to identify eating behaviour. The idea is to let the wearable work in the background rather than requiring constant interaction from the user.
This matters because traditional wearables can tell users plenty about what their bodies are doing without necessarily knowing what they are consuming. ODYSS is positioning the N1 as the missing dietary component of that picture.
Turning meals into a broader health picture
Rather than simply recording meals, the ODYSS N1 generates three Dietary Scores: Quality, Energy and Rhythm. The company says it can also explain the potential impact of each meal on energy, recovery and sleep, turning food information into something intended to be more useful than a simple list of calories or dishes.
Privacy is another major part of the device’s design. A dedicated physical switch allows users to turn all sensing functions on or off instantly. ODYSS says the necklace operates quietly by default when the user is not eating, while its software focuses specifically on food-related information. Faces and personal features in images are blurred, and raw images are deleted after processing.
For users, the potential benefit is straightforward: fewer meals to remember, less manual data entry, and a more continuous view of eating habits. The bigger question is whether ODYSS’s approach can make automated dietary tracking accurate and practical enough to replace the food diary altogether.
ODYSS showcased the N1 at IFA 2026 and presented it as an IFA Innovation Award 2026 winner.
