Over on Yanko Design they have a post on Phillip’s Design’s The Diagnostic Kitchen. Their goal is to give you an understanding of how food affects you. The method is slightly cryptic. Using a tabletop, scanning wand, and swallowable sensor, the device is supposed to give you real time data. Most of the time these highly developmental products never go anywhere, but often can spin-off some consumer use related devices. While skeptical over how effective the device could be for common use, the prospect is exciting nonetheless. If one were to develop a real-time, easy-to-use, cost-effective product it could revolutionize the entire diet industry, a $40M market.
Jason, go buy one I want to try it out.
Gabe I wonder if this thing works similarly to this body scanning thing they have at my gym. You get on this metal platform and hold these rods, and it passes some kind of electronic waves through your body to tell you your body composition, fat vs muscle, etc. It’s supposedly very accurate. You can feel this weird energy traveling through your arms and legs. Presumably you could use the same idea for food, but not by waving stuff around in the air.
Yeah, those rods would be sending small vibration pulses through your body and measuring the frequency response (density change). There are pretty specific things that your body is made of.
The problem with doing that with nutrition is that carbs, fat, and protein can all come in various densities depending on water content and such. Lots of calibration for all the different types of food we eat. Then again, you can fit all of itunes in a soda can worth of high density drives, so I guess you could have all that calibration data in a sensor.
They’re in development right now. Once they release one I’ll get it 
.
Wow, that is really interesting. I’d be interested to know the details of how it works in an engineering sense. I doubt you can just place a bunch of various foods on there and it can tell the nutrition in it. Similarly a sandwich or burrito where the external layer is not going to register properly without heavy calibration or something beyond the NonDestructiveInspection (NDI) techniques I am familiar with.
Still, that would be a pretty sweet tool in developing a diet on the fly or watching out for food allergies and the like.