Study: Tooth sensor measures what you eat

Geschatte leestijd: 2 minuten This invention is the solution to all your diet problems or your worst nightmare. A tooth sensor that registers everything you put in your mouth.

Every pound through the mouth

Imagine: You’re sitting with your friends on a terrace. There’s a nice spring sun shining, and somewhere in the background, you hear Anouk singing about spring. You just got your cappuccino and you’re stirring in some sugar while chatting away. Your phone starts vibrating on the table, but you decide to ignore it. Fifteen minutes and a croissant with brie later, your phone starts vibrating again, and once again, you decide to ignore it. When it vibrates again while you’re enjoying a beer, one of your friends asks if you shouldn’t check your phone. “No, it’s probably just my coach.” As your friends look at you questioningly, you grab your phone. And yes, four messages from the Fitsociety app. Sighing, you put away your half-drunk beer.

Eating is measuring

We’re not there yet. If the technology does advance that far, of course, we’ll leave it up to you whether you choose this optional ‘pounds-through-the-mouth-service’. But as makers of an online coaching app, we would naturally find this a fantastic way to know exactly what and how much someone eats. Not relying on someone’s discipline to keep an accurate food diary, but a tooth sensor that measures and reports everything accurately. You often hear people complain that they gain weight while eating little. Often, they have no idea how much they should eat to avoid gaining weight. If they do know, for example, expressed in calories, they often tend to underestimate how much they really eat. Knowing how much you should eat to maintain weight, lose weight, or gain weight is not that difficult. There are various calculators to make it easy for you. Keeping track of what you eat, however, is a daily task unless you eat the same thing every day. Even if we try to make it easy (as in our app with a barcode scanner), it remains a matter of registration that requires discipline. Your diet itself requires discipline so it would be nice if you didn’t have to spend time and energy documenting your food.

Tooth Sensor

Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have developed a sensor that can track which substances enter the mouth. The sensor is only 2 by 2 millimeters in size and can be attached to the teeth. There were already previous sensors capable of this, but they still used cables, which made practical use not very convenient. The new sensor transmits its data via radio signals. For example, the information can be sent to an app on a mobile phone. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the sensor can already record everything you eat. For now,

References:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adma.201703257