As Apple has reached new horizons of inventions, it has introduced a patent technology for allowing food vendors to embed information regarding nutrition in device readable RFID tags. The solution presents a partially autonomous and unique maneuver of calorie counting, which is one of the most difficult aspects of maintaining healthy lifestyle.
Moreover, Apple describes a method of encoding RFID tags details about one or more food items. The tags then transmit nutritional variables, such as fat content, calorie value and sugar content to a waiting NFC capable device like Apple Watch or iPhone. Along with nutritional information stored on a user device, specific metrics could be applied to a health monitoring application responsible for maintaining user assigned variables like daily calorie counting. In some instances, assigned nutritional value is deducted from daily allowance, which tells the user of what to eat and what not to eat.
Moving on, this invention of Apple also tells if a user should consume the entire meal or just a part of it. An app might poll onboard motion sensors to determine whether a user moved their arm to their mouth and apart from that, biometric sensors measure user’s heart rate while they are having food. Whether Apple intends to include this invention as a part of a future value added service remains unclear, although company have to go through many difficulties for implementation. Wide adoption would be a major concern for fledgling nutritional tracking product, just like many new service technologies. In the maintenance of food nutrition database, Apple’s RFID technology and employee training, investment would be done by grocers, restaurants and other purveyors.
Apart from shipping products, this company has long been rumored to market a full fledged health track device. Apple’s RFID based food nutrition tracking system patent was first file for April 2015.