
How many calories are on your plate? Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a gizmo that estimates the nutritional value of your meal with the mere snap of a smartphone.
NutriRay3D combines a smartphone app with a laser-mapping add-on: The app identifies what kind of food is in the picture, and the laser-mapper provides an estimate of each food’s volume. Then you get a real-time estimate of the calorie count and nutritional content.
The system gets around the toughest hurdles in nutrition tracking: Keeping an accurate record of what you eat, and figuring out how much of it you’re eating.