Why search for a special product if you only need the calories or ingredients ? Just scan a QR-code!
For processed foods, instead of searching for a specific product (e.g.yogurt of a certain brand), we just want to encode the nutritional information in both a human readable code and a machine readable code.
Chobani Vanilla Blended Non-Fat Greek Yogurt (32 oz) For 100g product, this means:
calories:57kcal fat: 0g carbs:6g protein:14g
We can just process the properties of this chart into JSON:
{ calories: 57, fat: 0, carbs:6, protein:14, }
The units could be implicit. Then use JSON.stringify() and encode this string into a qr code:
People can then just weigh the amount of food they want to consume from this product with a kitchen scale. The QR-Code/Reader is easy to include in fitness/health/diet-apps and people would only need to search for unprocessed foods without nutritional labe (e.g. "Potato", "Apple").
When i came up with this idea, originally i thought of Google's way to encode a specific Point in Google Maps to like 3 words of human readable language. For example, the point of White House, Washington would be: 38°53'51.7"N 77°02'11.5"W encoded into "dog banana three". Similar to this approach: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1751 for remembering passwords.
The JSON Object Notation is not necessarily the best option. Just as well there could be just the array of numbers, as long as we are able to infer what kind of nutritional key the number is assigned to.
{ calories: 57, fat: 0, carbs:6, protein:14, }
would become:
57,,6,14
or as QR Code:
| Index | Nutritional Value |
|---|---|
| 0 | calories |
| 1 | carbs |
| 2 | fat |
| 3 | protein |
| 4-99 | ? |
I want to make a Scale with a small glass window in the middle to scan NuCos. After the scan, i could either just weigh the amount of product or chose a measuring method. I could think about 3 workflows:
The calories are displayed for the amount of product you are currently weighing
The calories are displayed for the whole package. (Imagine a cup of yoghurt with fruit from a brand). Many products come with info about portion calorie count but since we are lazy we just scan it and it gets displayed.
Add/Auto: continious scanning and weighing of products to get a total calorie count at the end
Add/Total: continous scanning to get a total calorie count at the end
There are (thankfully) many unprocessed products, like fruit and vegetables. I doubt it would be a good solution to put another NuCo sticker on each of them. Maybe a simple database of those foods could be integrated into products like calorie counter apps or the mentioned NuCo Scale. Or if you are shopping, the supermarket can put a NuCo above the apple crate to scan or take a pic of.
The reason i stuck to QR-Codes is that they are in this case self-contained pieces of information. That means everything i need is the QR-Code and a small decoder that creates a nutritional chart from it. Image Recognition is constantly evolving and there would probably be a need to transfer the image to a server for analysis. I want the whole system to work offline. Then there are NFC tags which work, but im sure that printing on a surface is easier and more environmentally friendly than producing a plastic chip to glue somewhere.
A cool benefit of this system being so simple is that everyone could make their own NuCos. It would be easy to make a NuCo Generator App or Website that lets you put in all information and get a high resolution QR Code back to put on your food.
Let's make some Mac and Cheese.
The basic ingredients are macaroni, cheese and milk. Since all of those have packaging, just scan the NuCo, weigh and prepare the meal. Its a family portion, so you get a total of 3000 calories. Now you either have the choice to divide your food by, lets say, 3 and know its 1000kcal each. Or you could save that info in a NuCo supported system (NuCo Scale, Calorie App). You could print out the code and put it on the tupperware you give to your fellow dieting-buddy (if you want to sabotage the dieting efforts by giving them Mac and Cheese). Sure, it would be easy to just note the kcal of the whole meal and then use common sense and some first grade mathematics to figure out how many calories a certain food has but the real benefit of the NuCo here is that it also includes all info about the composition of the food (sugar, vitamins, fat, etc.).