What the Fork – $100?
Why do we need a smart fork, you may ask? Well, here’s the hype…
Studies show that people who eat slower eat 11% fewer calories and digest food better, so HAPILABS introduced 2 devices at CES: HAPIfork and HAPItrack. The dishwasher safe HAPIfork got immense press coverage, including articles in Consumer Reports and Bon Appetit, as well as placement on the Stephen Colbert Show (see video below).
This latest electronic gadget functions like a friendly shock collar by paying attention to when you eat, how many bites you take, and the intervals between each bite, vibrating to tell you when you’re eating too fast or too much. The goal is to encourage you to slow down, chew your food, improve your digestion, transform the way you eat, and… enjoy life more. HAPIfork then communicates with your smartphone so you can track your eating habits or share them with friends online.
If you’re a fitness buff who already has a collection of dongles, heart monitors, motion sensors, wristbands, and other wearable gear to measure your heart rate, the number of steps you’ve taken, and your general activity level, then something as germane and silly as knowing how many seconds you’re waiting in-between bites may seem, well, unimportant.
But if you’re struggling to lose weight, then this might just help, even if you only use it for a few weeks while it changes your habits. This sort of product could even help to address the growing obesity epidemic, which is a Big problem (excuse the pun) and arguably threatens the health, wellness and very survival of our nation.
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The company’s second product, HAPItrack, goes beyond a wearable pedometer by allowing you to record moments throughout the day when you’re most happy and then help you understand ways to adjust your behavior so you are happy more often and develop healthier habits. A longer 7:17 VIDEO shows both products in the CES booth.
Following the trend of Moore’s Law, digital technology is getting embedded into all sorts of everyday objects, and HAPIfork is just one example. My Philips Sonicare toothbrush is another. It’s several years old now, and I’ve used it to open presentations on the future of technology, because it has a Zilog microprocessor that can execute 10 million 8-bit instructions per second. I contrast that with the IBM mainframe I worked on in the mid-1970s, a System/370 model 158 that could only execute 1 million instructions per second. The mainframe then cost about $3.5 million, was liquid cooled, and consumed a large computer room. So, I was not that surprised to see HAPIfork at CES. Their HAPIspoon also caused quite a stir.