Made Us Look: A Smart Plate That Helps with Portion Control
What if your dinner plate could act as your personalized nutritionist? Seems like something out of the Jetsons, right? Well there’s a new concept design from a student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who is trying to make that far-fetched future a reality. As an entry into the 10th annual Electrolux Design Lab competition, she has entered a concept called My Diet Plate.
The idea behind My Diet Plate is that you would enter in your dietary information and eating plan into an app on your phone. No carbs? Trying to keep sweets to a minimum? Just tell it what your preferences are. When it comes time to have dinner, you can enter the recipes you use into the app, and by syncing up your app with a base module you keep on the table, that base module would connect with your dinner plate via WiFi. Once the program analyzed your meal, it would project onto your plate the exact portion sizes of everything you should eat using LEDs built into the bottom.
Part of the concept is that the plates would be inherently social—in that they would get you comparing portions and talking about healthy eating. We’d love for it to have information about food allergies, too. That way if you’re at a dinner party and the main dish has gluten or dairy, each person’s plate would notify them that it’s something they can’t eat. No word on whether that kind of information will be included.
Our only remaining question is: Will the plate know if you cheat on your diet? If so, will it yell at you? We kind of hope it does to keep us honest, but we kind of hope it doesn’t because we always want more pizza ;)
Watch the video to get the complete picture of how the device works. (Just be prepared for some seriously cheesy music!) We’ll be keeping an eye out for this to go into production!
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