Lose It!, one of the earliest food tracking apps, announced the beta launch of a new feature this morning: Snap It, which allows users to log food by taking a picture of it (then selecting the correct food from a list).
“We’ve been thinking about it for years and years an years and the question has been, when will be the time when the technology is close enough that anyone will ever use it? And...
San Carlos-based ShopWell, which offers a nutrition app, raised $3.4 million in a round led by Finistere Ventures, with participation from Fairhaven Capital, Munich Venture Partners, S2G Ventures, and ATA Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to about $11.4 million.
The company has developed an app that suggests healthier options to users as they shop for food. The program scores ...
Humana has partnered with Kurbo Health, which offers a mobile-enabled program aimed at preventing childhood obesity, to offer its employer customers the option to add a 12-month subscription of Kurbo Health as a wellness benefit for their employees.
Before offering this option to employers, Humana conducted two internal pilots of the offering.
“Employers have begun to realize the impact of...
Boston-based digital health startup Gain Life has launched its first offering, ManUp Health, which is an online weight loss program designed for men.
ManUp Health was founded by three former Procter & Gamble employees who found that there weren't weight loss services designed specifically for men. A Fortune article this past January noted that about 90 percent of Weight Watchers members are...
Existing UnitedHealthCare tool
At the HxRefactored event in Boston last week, UnitedHealth Group Vice President of Innovation and R&D Kunjorn Chambundabongse discussed the strategy behind the payor's internal incubation group and revealed one of the group's newest projects, a vending machine that will sync up with employee wellness plans.
Chambundabongse said that, according to IDC, one...
Sherry Pagoto, Associate Professor of Medicine, UMMS
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and Worcester Polytechnic Institute have developed an app that helps people understand why they are overeating. The team was awarded $2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for this project.
The app, called Relax, is designed for patients who are in clinical...
Almond Systems CEO Eswar Priyadarshan
Palo Alto-based Almond Systems raised $9 million from Matrix Partners and Charles River Ventures to develop a product that helps people make healthy, personalized eating decisions.
The company's founding team CEO Eswar Priyadarshan, VP of Creative Development Jon Altschuler, and VP of Engineering Ravi Chittari were all previously Apple employees. Before...
Thanks to a $100,000 grant from the philanthropic arm of insurance company Florida Blue, researchers with affiliations to Johns Hopkins Medicine, are launching a study on how tracking devices and apps can help obese teenagers make healthier decisions, according to a Reuters report.
The researchers recently visited a high school in Florida to begin recruiting the 50 teenagers it plans to sign up...
Mock up of a calorie counting device
GE Research has developed a prototype of a microwave that could someday measure calories in the foods that a user warms up, according to a report from MIT Technology Review. This first prototype is only capable of measuring the caloric content of some liquids.
GE Global Research Senior Scientist Matt Webster invented the device when he was looking for a way...
Researchers at a university in Greece are coordinating a European Union funded project, called Splendid, that leverages sensors to record the eating habits and activity levels of children and young adults to nudge them into making healthier decisions. The study is aimed at curbing the obesity epidemic and initially includes 200 high school aged students in Sweden. Another group in Netherlands...
