MyFoodPhone launches $9.99/month camera phone nutrition service via Sprint

Some 20 months after I wrote about the beginning of MyFoodPhone, the service has been rolled out commercially, according to the Sprint press release today.

[Yes, I know the permalink for my previous article is formatted incorrectly.  I’m checking on it.]

“MyFoodPhone will provide Sprint camera phone users access to the world's first nutrition service based on the use of camera phone images and video feedback.  MyFoodPhone allows Sprint customers to conveniently track their food consumption and have easy, remote access to nutrition counseling based on their eating habits….

“MyFoodPhone enables Sprint camera phone users to take a picture of the food they eat at each meal or snack and send it in for review by a nutritional advisor (see below).  Customers receive video feedback on their eating habits biweekly for only $9.99 a month [plus tax].

“The service's unique mobile food-journaling application helps customers monitor what they eat, modify their eating habits, and achieve their individual health goals through motivation provided by personalized counseling from trained, credible MyFoodPhone Nutrition Advisors,” the release says.

Health/wellness applications

“MyFoodPhone's ‘Visual Food Journal’ allows customers to send their Picture Mail photos to a Web-based Food Journal at www.myfoodphone.com/sprint (see below) and log data such as weight, exercise, and calories burned to track their progress on their Sprint phones. 

“A unique dashboard shows the various food categories of each meal and how many portions the customer has consumed.  Then a nutrition advisor provides feedback through a video clip on how to improve eating habits.”

Documentation

I test lots of phones, including many multimedia phones from Sprint.  I just grabbed a Samsung A900, opened the Web application and searched for MyFoodPhone.  It’s available and here’s the description on the screen:

“Picture yourself healthy with MyFoodPhone.  Use your camera phone to take a picture or video of each meal, view your food journal and get personalized video feedback from a nutritional advisor on how you can eat better.”

There’s also a “Learn More” button that provides a few lines of additional information about how the service works.

Related applications

The company providing the application, MyFoodPhone Nutrition, also offers a non-wireless version and it’s significantly more expensive. 

The health-related application is one of several that Sprint already offers.  For example, the press release mentions such applications as “BIMActive from Bones In Motion, which uses GPS to track the user's outdoor exercise routes to calculate distance and speed, save the routes for later use, and share with others online.

“Health Browser provides access to skynetMD's mobile health Web site, covering disease and drug information, dieting tools, health highlights and health tips.  Hitech Trainer provides ‘personal trainer’ designed workouts for the beginning- or advanced-level user with audio and video instructions to guide you through the exercises.”

Unique to camera phones

One aspect of these applications is they try to leverage the value of camera phones.  For example, how many people would write in a paper journal or go online to keep track of the food they eat?

Certainly some people maintain careful records of their nutritional habits.  But taking a snapshot or video of your meal and transmitting it to MyFoodPhone makes the process easier.

Whether or not you want to use the application, the concept is, I believe, to find products and services that take advantage of the camera phone’s capabilities.  The concept is not just to use it as a “mere” digital camera to snap photos of your kids and pets but, rather, as more of an extension of your life.

Okay, sure, this sounds a bit like a marketing piece.  But camera phones (including video recording) indeed have unique capabilities and we’ll see many more applications in the future that can’t be accomplished with a (non-wireless) digital camera.