NEW YORK: A tiny microphone-like device in your ear can help you lose your weight, tracking the rate at which you chew and documenting the foods you eat.
What’s more, the tracker, which will cost $159 when it launches, even offers real-time suggestions about nutrition and health while you eat. An IndieGogo campaign for the product has already surpassed its goal of $60,000 in funding.
According to a website, the BitBite works by recording incoming sounds through a microphone and sensors, detecting pattern recognition. Through sound analysis, it can tell what and how much you have eaten, tracking the number of calories as well. Alternatively, it can document what you eat when you say the food out loud.
Since you wear it each time you eat, it also learns your eating schedule to determine whether you could benefit from eating more or less often, and where you are when you tend to consume the most.
The BitBite smartphone app transfers this data into an automatic diet diary, helping you monitor your eating habits and daily calorie intake. The aim is to improve your nutrition by encouraging you to chew more, eat more slowly and eat at regular intervals.
BitBite was founded by Etai Granit, who came up with the idea after he struggled to maintain a food diary on the advice of his dietitian.
‘I tried using all those wearable bands and stickers for counting my bites, but they were incredibly inaccurate, and not very comfortable,’ he explains.
‘That’s when I thought of creating a user-friendly automated dietary recording system (ADRS). As it turns out, this device is the most comfortable and produces the most accurate results of all dietary wearables… I finally feel like I have my own personal dietitian with me wherever I go.’
According to nutrition adviser Dr David L Katz, the BitBite may well revolutionize how we eat, perhaps even helping to combat the obesity epidemic.
‘It provides a novel and empowering way to address healthful eating and weight control,’ he said of the product. ‘By focusing on “how” as opposed to just the “what” of healthful eating, BitBite has the potential to help replace short-term dieting with lasting improvements in eating, lifestyle and health.’ The BitBite, which weighs less than three ounces, comes in white, black or pink.
