Scan nutritional information like you would a check or barcode
Create an algorithm that will scan the nutritional information off of a picture that the user would take using his or her phone to add new foods. This would be similar to making a mobile check deposit or scanning a QR code. I feel it would be best used when adding new foods so that the user doesn't have to input everything manually.
Hello Jonathan,
That is a great idea. We have some photo ideas, but looking at the tech industry it might instead be interesting to try and implement this idea in the technology that will hopefully be standard on a phone in a few years!
Kind Regards,
Alec
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Ramiro Negri commented
Hope to see this happen. Other apps do it pretty well
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O A commented
Hey, flagging this as a very underrated idea.
It's 2021 now, a lot has changed since it was suggested in 2017.
nearly all phones have quality OCR scanning tech built into their cameras.
NLP libraries are robust.
Your product and engineering teams should be able to pull this off pretty easily.
Another reason to do this is the massive rise in grocery subscription deliveries with COVID-19.
Vendors such as Imperfect foods in the USA have their own brands of product that ship with no barcode on the package, but they DO still have the nutritional data.
It is impossible to properly log those foods right now
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Nick Obey commented
It would also be helpful to just have the photo of the nutrition label scanned for later verification by other members.
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Liam Day commented
I’ve been playing around using CSV text in QR codes to provide readers with the nutritional information. Would require some kind of market wide standard to implement but is far more simple than text reading tech. Thoughts?