An App to Fight Overeating

With the holidays in full swing, like me, you are probably overdoing it: your pants may or may not be strangling you as you sit at your desk, contemplating yet another colorful cookie.

No? Then this blog probably isn’t for you.

However, for those of you who, like me, are gluttonous animals, likely cloaked in a fine cookie dust, there may be help on the horizon in the shape of a new app being developed by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Connecticut.

Aptly named SlipBuddy, the three-pronged approach to weight management involves keeping track of a user’s eating patterns, offering intervention and assistance to change the behavior.

What makes this app different in a sea of competing apps, according to researchers, is that the process is simple. Users are asked to check in three times a day to fill in information about factors such as stress levels, hours of sleep, fatigue and when the user felt like they had eaten too much. Once collected, a machine learning algorithm is applied to the data, looking at possible patterns and triggers for over-eating. The notion behind determining these patterns, according to researchers, is that the app can help predict conditions likely to trigger an over-eating event, for instance while watching TV, late at night or when the user can’t sleep.

In those instances, sensing that the conditions are prime for the user to over-eat, the app will intervene by suggesting that the user take a walk, turn off the TV or engage in some other stress-reducing activity.

"Mobile technology, which is ubiquitous today, has the capacity to deliver evidence-based weight loss interventions with lower cost and user burden than traditional intervention models," said Carolina Ruiz, associate professor of computer science at WPI.

Built for the Android platform, the app eventually will be available for iOS devices, as well. Although still in the research phase, designers believe that the app could be ready for release as early as 2019.

Would this app appeal to you or would you, like me, need something a bit more convincing, say an app that physically smacks a cookie out of your hand?