Column Judith Witte: Bite meter

Bzziep-bzziep goes my watch. I glance at the screen. The number 10,000 lights up. You're probably already connecting the dots. (Yes, it’s the pedometer.)

My watch is super smart. It knows how many meters of elevation I’ve gained during my run, how fast I swam, how far I biked, and what my heart rate is. I receive messages on it, and there are countless songs stored on it that I can stream wirelessly to my ears through my Bluetooth earphones. In the early morning, it tells me whether I slept peacefully or restlessly, and with a score between 0 and 100, it lets me know if I’m properly recharged after the night (although that can backfire sometimes: thinking I’m well-rested, only to see a score of 40, and immediately feeling exhausted). The device regularly needs to recharge itself too, of course, so I can (oh yeah, it does that as well) keep checking the time. If you filmed me right now and sent that video back to my younger self, 25 years ago, I’d probably think I’d ended up in Star Trek. But it’s real. I find myself, somewhat ashamed, not even amazed anymore. Not really. Data, data, and more data – combined with ultra-smart devices. We can’t live without them anymore. Not in our daily lives, and certainly not in our work.

Speaking of pedometers, there’s also a “bite meter” now. That’s a message that did spark some wonder in me (also because I just love the term). In food research, for instance, when studying the speed at which people eat, researchers film participants while they’re eating. Afterward, someone manually notes every bite, chew, and swallow. A time-consuming task, especially when you have many participants to analyze. Researcher Michele Tufano developed software to analyze how people eat using a computer. He uses open-source software for facial recognition, which places a 3D mask over the image of the face (the same technique used in Instagram or Snapchat filters). Based on a three-dimensional grid, the computer determines when someone takes a bite. Clever!

Time-consuming, tedious, complex tasks are the playground for automation experts, programmers, machine and robot builders. You can almost see them think: ‘There’s got to be a better way! Easier! Lighter! Smarter! More efficient!’—and then they go into full inventor mode. Read about the smart solutions and amazing innovations that have come from such brainwaves. But also about the challenges and key issues. Read on and … be amazed!

Judith Witte
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