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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

diabetes

Yes Health Raises $6M for Personalized Weight Loss and Nutrition Platform

We all know that sticking to diets is really hard work — especially when you’re stuck at home and the snack cabinet is never far from reach.

Yes Health is a digital health platform meant to help people reach their weight loss or diabetes prevention and management goals. Today, the startup announced that it had netted $6 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures (hat tip to Techcrunch).

Yes Health’s mobile platform is meant to help people do one of two things: lose weight, or prevent diabetes. New users select one pathway and answer a short questionnaire about what sort of coaching you prefer (cheerleader/straightforward), your top goals, and the biggest challenges you struggle with to reach those goals. The system then creates an individualized health plan and schedule which outlines when you should eat meals, exercise, and sleep, and tracks your progress via photos and a daily weigh in.

Yes Health costs $49/month for the one year diabetes program (which comes with a Fitbit and digital scale), or $69 for coaching only. The four-month weight loss program costs $49/month (and includes a Fitbit). Yes Health sells both directly to consumers and is included in some employee health plans.

The real value add of the app seems to be the ease with which the personalized coaching is woven into the system. Users can take a picture of their meals, which Yes Health shares with nutritionists for assessment — no need to manually enter every ingredient in their salad or soup. Users also get access to personalized coaching for their workouts, including feedback when they complete certain exercises.

Yes Health isn’t the only app out there to offer nutrition coaching via photo. Bite.ai is a food journal that automatically breaks down the nutrition info of your meals based on photos, and in France, Foodvisor does much of the same thing. But neither service offers the same level of exercise recommendations and coaching that Yes Health does.

True, the messages all come from computers, not actual humans, so the interaction isn’t as powerful as it would be with an in-person coach. But an in-person coach is going to cost a lot more than $69 per month — plus, we’re not allowed to see people in person anymore.

For that reason, I think COVID-19 will present some appealing growth opportunities for online healthy lifestyle services like Yes Health. Since we can’t go to gyms or restaurants, we have to create our own exercise and dining plans. Tools like Yes Health could help folks to create a structured plan for nutrition and exercise to stay on course during social distancing. And that’s especially critical at a time when health is on the top of mind for all of us.

Robots + Connected Kitchen Appliances Can Help Diabetics Manage Diets

Anyone with kids knows that getting them to eat healthy can be a challenge. That challenge is compounded if your child has a disease like diabetes, where their diets must be strictly managed.

That’s where Belgium-based IDLab thinks robots can help, especially for older kids who are a little more independent. In the video below, IDLab demonstrates how a home robot working in conjunction with a connected cooking device like mealhero’s can help people with diabetes watch their carbohydrate intake and regulate their insulin accordingly.

The video shows more of a use case scenario, rather than a full-blown production level solution (it also over-simplifies the carbs in carrots). It’s also pretty complicated, requiring the robot, a mealhero meal plan and steamer, a connected food scale and a calculator to figure out the carb count of a meal to enter into an insulin pump.

But it’s easy to see from this proof-of-concept where the technology could eventually go. The robot provides a “friendly” interface to guide the child or whomever through a meal planning process. A product like mealhero works in this scenario because it has a standardized set of ingredients that are shipped individually and its connected cooking device automatically cooks the food. Similar companies like Tovala, Suvie or Brava could provide the same type of meal+connected appliance.

Given these basic building blocks, there’s no reason the process couldn’t work with any number of diseases that require adherence to a particular diet.

When we write about robots, there are often two big caveats: first is that there will be a human employment cost as automation continues; second, useful robotics applications in the home are still a ways off in the future. What IDLab is demonstrating here is that food-related robots can actually be helpful to people and while clunky, that robotic future is closer to today than some distant tomorrow.