声控营养跟踪器有助于减肥

For people struggling with obesity, logging calorie counts and other nutritional information at every meal is a proven way to lose weight. The technique does require consistency and accuracy, however, and when it fails, it's usually because people don't have the time to find and record all the information they need. A few years ago, a team of nutritionists from Tufts University who had been experimenting with mobile-phone apps for recording caloric intake approached members of the Spoken Language Systems Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), with the idea of a spoken-language application that would make meal logging even easier.

This week, at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Shanghai, the MIT researchers are presenting a Web-based prototype of their speech-controlled nutrition-logging system.

With it, the user verbally describes the contents of a meal, and the system parses the description and automatically retrieves the pertinent nutritional data from an online database maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The data is displayed together with images of the corresponding foods and pull-down menus that allow the user to refine their descriptions -- selecting, for instance, precise quantities of food. But those refinements can also be made verbally. A user who begins by saying, "For breakfast, I had a bowl of oatmeal, bananas, and a glass of orange juice" can then make the amendment, "I had half a banana," and the system will update the data it displays about bananas while leaving the rest unchanged.

"What [the Tufts nutritionists] have experienced is that the apps that were out there to help people try to log meals tended to be a little tedious, and therefore people didn't keep up with them," says James Glass, a senior research scientist at CSAIL, who leads the Spoken Language Systems Group. "So they were looking for ways that were accurate and easy to input information."