ByteMe: Listen To Your Gut
When asked to examine how we understand food, our team decided to listen to our gut. We created a wearable technology called ByteMe — Your new health-buddy & biome guide. Connecting what you eat with how you feel. In a day and age where we are presented with so many conflicting standards of how to understand nutrition, we looked directly to the individual’s own digestion and unique microbiome to lead our user towards an increased awareness of their own biological habits, empowering them to create personalized standards of health and wellbeing. The ByteMe band & guide makes the Recommended Daily Value obsolete.
ByteMe stands apart from other fitness trackers, including FitBit, Jawbone, and Leaf, in that it is the most personal, actionable, and short-term tracker on the market. We don’t aim to simply track, ByteMe’s purpose is to guide our health-conscious user towards a deeper understanding of his/her own body. While ByteMe is a useful tool for anyone to understand how food impacts the body, our three core users include athletes striving to reach and maintain optimal health, individuals with IBS and digestion-related issues, and health-curious trackers.
The ByteMe wearable bracelet is a two-piece sensor bracelet (yin-yang inspired) that talks in real-time to a smart app that is able to measure nutritional inputs (food, water, and supplements) and functional outputs (yes, you know what we’re talking about). The dual tracker is made possible by state of the art spectroscopic technology that analyzes the nutritional data of all food eaten throughout the day (input) , and optic sensors that are able to detect size and consistency of waste product (output). Synthesized with information gathered on individual’s water intake, exercise, and sleep quality, this data is used by the app to give an indivudal a visual representation of their digestive health. The core feature is the daily “Wake Up Call” that gives a reading on an individual’s energy and digestion over the past 24 hours. Over time, the app begins to learn what works and what doesn’t work for the individual, and is able to give personalized recommendations on how to adjust one’s diet for optimal nutrient absorption & ease of digestion.
During the prototyping process, we engaged with themes of private vs. public understanding around food. ByteMe brings food and nutrition down to an extremely personal level, and also requires users to engage with their own bodily functions in ways they might not have before. Even with all the emerging information on how important the gut is to an individual’s health… we realized it still remains a challenge to bring poop to the table.
Editor’s Note: This article was written by a Food + Future coLAB Fellow to share their concepts and experiences from the first week of our January 2016 program, focused on the theme of Understanding. For more information, please visit foodfuturecolab.com/understanding.
