Discovering Vanesia, The Smart Food Watcher

Vanesia – The Smart Food Watcher is the name of the digital project created and developed by Italian entrepreneur Vanessa Solimeno. It is a new calorie counter application that recognizes food, processes the received data, and develops a daily report. We contacted the creator of the project to explore the app’s features and possible developments within the target market.

There are already other tools in the app stores to record a food diary or recognize food through a photo, but none of them seems to have the reliability and completeness of Vanesia, an app that aims to combine all calorie counting functions through the interaction between a smartphone and a wearable device around which, as we will see, the entire project revolves. Vanesia is aimed at food enthusiasts and those who need to keep their diet under control.

How Vanesia was born?

Vanesia is the female name of a new technological partner that, like Siri or Alexa, you can call on command to tell you how many calories you are consuming during a meal. “My first food diary – says Vanessa Solimeno, the creator of Vanesia – was prescribed to me at the age of 16 by the dietitian to describe what I was eating and how I felt while eating it. The activity soon became a good habit that made me develop the ability to keep track of the calories ingested during the day.”

The idea of Vanesia was born 10 years ago, when Vanessa discovered the existence of the first rudimentary calorie counting applications on her tablet. “It would be nice to be able to take a picture with a watch that immediately tells you how many calories the dish contains!” she thought, “a bit like the movies of Soviet spies that I saw as a child.”

Today, Vanesia has become a reality thanks to computer technology called “food recognition”, based on biometric recognition and data mining of ingredients identified in the dish after the app sends the photo to the smartphone. The photographic recognition engine has an input (variable and adjustable according to the needs and its ability to acquire objects of known dimensions) and an output (returned based on necessary data such as dish name, name and probability, visually similar dishes). Once the input-output process identifies the dish and the user validates it, the recognition engine links the nutritional data to the dish and creates the value card.

Regarding the first version of her application, Vanessa thinks that “obviously it can still be improved, even if it is already well based on the concept of the immediacy of the ‘photo + dish + report’ process. Keep in mind that the ‘food recognition’ technology is powered by artificial intelligence that needs to be trained by users, so my invitation is to take as many photos as possible to help the app improve its performance”.

Vanesia will not only work with smartphones: through a device consisting of a camera, the app will be integrated into a class accessory (pendant, smartwatch strap, shirt cufflinks) that captures photos and processes data. The device will be a distinctive object and will be the main mode of input for food photography, using a voice function that tells Vanesia the meal’s ingredients to be entered into the food diary.

“Even today,” concludes Vanessa, “I fill out my daily food diary and use many competitor apps that inspire me to improve Vanesia. The advice I would like to give is to use these monitoring tools without them becoming a disease. They should be used, in fact, to better understand the many small gestures that improve or worsen our diet.”

On the website https://vanesia.blog, you can learn more about this calorie-counting app. A suite of small gadgets customized with Vanesia is also coming, such as fitness shirts, tops, and leggings, small exercise and yoga equipment, water bottles, visors, headbands, yoga mats, and beach towels.