BiteWise

A vibrating bracelet that tracks your eating tempo with accompanying app that helps with mindful eating.

Comment

Inspiration

In today’s fast-paced and distracted lifestyle, people often eat too quickly without realizing it. This can negatively impact digestion, satiety, and overall health.

Our initial idea was to integrate this concept into a smart fork. However, we quickly discovered that this approach was impractical—added weight and design complexity caused food to fall off. This led us to pivot toward a simpler, more effective, and wearable solution that works in real time.

What it does

BiteWise is a smart bracelet that tracks eating behavior by monitoring hand-to-mouth movements. It measures eating speed and promotes mindful eating.

When the eating rate exceeds a healthy threshold, the bracelet provides gentle haptic feedback (vibration) to encourage the user to slow down.

We model eating speed as:

[ \text{Eating Speed} = \frac{\text{Number of bites}}{\text{Time}} ]

How we built it

  • Motion sensor to track arm movements
  • Simple algorithm to detect eating patterns
  • Vibration motor for real-time feedback
  • Minimal, wearable bracelet design

Our focus was on:

  • Simplicity
  • Affordability
  • Ease of use

Challenges we ran into

  • Differentiating eating from similar movements (e.g., drinking, gesturing)
  • Maintaining a balance between functionality and simplicity

Accomplishments

  • Developed a realistic and scalable concept
  • Successfully pivoted from an impractical idea to a wearable solution
  • Created a discreet, unisex design
  • Enabled real-time behavioral feedback, which is key for habit change

What we learned

  • Simplicity is powerful
  • Real-time feedback drives behavior change
  • Iteration and adaptability are crucial in innovation

What’s next for BiteWise

  • Improve detection accuracy using smarter algorithms
  • Develop a companion app for personalization

We aim to personalize eating thresholds:

[ \text{Threshold}_{user} = f(\text{age}, \text{BMI}, \text{goals}) ]

  • Conduct user testing for validation
  • Refine both hardware and user experience

Built With

Share this project:

Updates