The LUMME kCalculator is a machine learning smartwatch app that you can train like a puppy to passively sense when you’re eating from your hand motions and scientifically measure your energy intake. Once trained, detection will occur as long as you’re eating for at least a few minutes at a time and you’re bringing food to your mouth.  You can eat as you normally would with a fork, spoon or hands.

• Compatible Apple Watch 4/5/6/7/SE
• Worn on the hand used for eating 
• kCalculator Complication (widget) on active watch face
• At least one Training Session (10 bites of food)
• 75+% Weekly Meal Verification Score
• Use ‘Find Missing Meals’ to retrieve any missed detections

First ensure that you are syncing your motion sensor data.  Your main meal diary screen will provide a ‘Last data synced’ timestamp.  If it’s blank, please follow the instructions for data syncing.  Otherwise, here are a few suggestions:

1. Check Find Missing Meals eating detection under different sensitivity.

2. More Training data is required. Go to Settings > Training.

3. Take at least a couple bites a minute for at least 3 minutes

4. Bring food to your mouth and not vice-versa (hand movement is essential)

5. Watch should be on the eating hand

6. Open up the app sometime after you eat for faster data processing

Let us know what you’re experiencing, and we’ll be able to provide some additional guidance.

support@lummehealth.com

Here are the most common ways to resolve this problem:

1. On your watch, please verify that the kCalculator complication is visible on the watch face you use. The complication is essential for data transfer. If you missed this during the watch configuration, you’ll find some guidance here.

2. Launch the kCalculator app on your phone and watch. Please ensure that you do not remove the kCalculator app using the App Switcher UI on your phone.  This kills the app and prevents it from detecting eating.

3. On your phone, open Watch app > Privacy > Enable Fitness Tracking (if not enabled already).

4. On your phone, open Watch app > General > Background App Refresh > Enabled background app refresh (if not enabled already).

5. Restart your iPhone and then your Apple Watch.

6. If there are any other issues, the phone app will give you alert messages upon app launch.

Contact us at support@lummehealth.com for additional assistance.

There are 4 key ways in which the kCalculator learns:

1. Deleting false detections.

2. Confirming correct detections by assigning those sessions as breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack.

3.  Running a Training Session for at least 10 bites.

4. Retrieving missed detections from Find Missing Meals

Similar to a voice-to-text dictation app that learns the subtleties of your voice, “training” the kCalculator app to learn the subtleties of your eating gestures, even for a few minutes, can result in dramatic improvements in eating detection. We recommend using the Training Session module in the Settings menu at the start of using the app, and as often as you like. Try training in the key places where you sit (or stand) to eat.

It’s easy. Just run it for 10 bites at your next meal.  Following the instructions provided, simply take a bite of food, tap the button with your off-hand, and repeat.  The effects of a training session will kick in the following day.

Your Meal Verification Score is the leading indicator of your app’s level of personalization.  When you CONFIRM an eating detection or DELETE it, you’re actually using machine learning to train your app to distinguish between your TRUE and False eating gestures.  Aim to keep this high and watch your detection accuracy and calorie estimates improve with each successive day of use.   

If your app ‘fails’ to detect an eating session, there’s a good chance you’ll find it under Find Missing Meals (FMM).   FMM allows you to see eating detections under different Eating Detection Sensitivity settings. 

Your default eating detection sensitivity is set to ‘LESS Detections’, but you can view eating detections sensed under the ‘MORE‘ or ‘MOST‘ settings.  Once a detection is Accepted (Select, Save & Exit), you can edit or delete it within your Meal Diary.  You can also update your Default detection setting on this page.

If you do NOT find your missing meal here, you can use the Add Calories Manually option.  This might also be a good indication that you should conduct a Training Session where the meal was missed.

Your kCalculator filters over 30K gestures in a day to identify the 100+ times you actually put food to your mouth. So some false detections will occur.  By deleting any falsely detected eating sessions in your diary, you’ll teach your app to do better.  

The kCalculator is continuously filtering through tens of thousands of gestures to identify the times when you are eating.  When it identifies an eating session, it will create a meal record in your diary and ask for confirmation on your watch or phone. 

Apple’s iOS controls when and where eating detection notifications are issued.  Typically, this can range from 15 – 60 min after you have eaten.  The variance is due to background processing factors dictated by the iOS environment.  Some of the many factors include battery life, app usage and app slider visibility. 

If you miss a notification, the kCalculator will still create an unconfirmed ‘Eating Detected’ meal record. 

Open up your kCalculator phone app for about 30 seconds sometime after you’ve finished eating (wait at least 5 minutes after eating). This will ‘force’ the synchronization of your sensor data for processing.

In addition to seeing your data faster, iOS will start to give your app better background processing priority, which creates a virtuous cycle.

What happens if you don’t open the app?

iOS will sync your data as determined by its algorithms. We observe huge variability from once per hour to many hours.

Also, as the time lengthens between synchronizations, so does the build-up of your data, sometimes creating longer delays or requiring multiple synchronization routines to catch up.

If you have cellular or wi-fi connectivity issues, this can also slow things down, but you’ll otherwise start to see the benefits of reviewing your meal data a few times a day. This will also make it much easier to verify your meal detections and delete any false detections, which improves personalization!

Does Siri correctly spell every word that you dictate through the microphone?  Not likely, but it continues to improve.  Similarly, the kCalculator is designed to naturally improve based on your inputs.  Each input from you fine-tunes the app for better detection accuracy and calorie estimates.  The Training tool within the app adds a heavy dose of personalization to your app.  So does Find Missing Meals, when you import a missed detection. Basic Meal Verification is also essential for personalization.  The more it learns, and the more training it receives, the better it will detect your eating.  For some perspective, the app may sift through upwards of ninety-thousand hand gestures in day to identify just 100+ instances where you put food to your mouth! 

kCalculator uses scientifically-validated bite-based estimates, which use an objective caloric proxy for your bites according to various profile details, including your gender, age, height and current weight.  This handles the volume of food that you eat (your portion sizes), which is the major driver of your daily calories.  To account for variances in energy density associated with what you eat, the kCalculator gives you the option to refine your estimate using the Calorie Type slider.

Your food choices will always matter to your health and impact your calories.  It’s also true that the major driver of your daily calories comes down to your portion sizes – simply HOW MUCH YOU EAT. kCalculator measures this volume of food from your bites.  The vast majority of variance in energy density associated with WHAT YOU EAT can be captured with one simple question regarding your ‘Meal Type’. kCalculator defaults to a Meal Type of Mixed High and Low Calorie Foods, but you can use the simple slider in your Meal Diary to adjust your Meal Type to High Calorie Foods or Low Calorie Foods. 

Calorie Types provide a simple and effective way to categorize your meals and snacks according to the energy density of the foods you eat. For simplicity, kCalculator defaults your meals and snacks to the Mix of High and Low Calorie Foods calorie type. If you’re eating mainly Low Calorie Foods (salad, fish, fruit, vegetables) or High Calorie Foods (burgers, pizza, sweets), use the simple slider in your Meal Diary to select these alternative options.

Take a look at the tables below to get a better understanding of the Meal Types.

Calories are a measure of energy intake and can be used in conjunction with a calorie goal or as a point of reference to understand your eating habits better. Just keep in mind that your food choices still matter to good health.  Be sure to check out the “What to Know About Counting Calories to Lose Weight“.  It’s packed with great information.

Beverages can range from zero calories (water) to hundreds of calories (meal replacement shakes). If you consume caloric beverages such as sugary drinks, smoothies, alcoholic beverages or meal replacement shakes, your Meal Diary provides a simple way to add these calories. It’s often easy to find the calorie information for these beverages on the nutrition label, just be sure to pay close attention to the portion size that you consumed.

kCalculator aims to simplify calorie tracking by providing a balance between accuracy, reliability and effort. The most precise calorie measurement techniques, such as weighing individual food items and looking up their energy composition, are also the most cumbersome and impractical. Even calorie tracking apps require that you correctly estimate your portion sizes. With minimal effort, kCalculator offers a useful and reliable daily measure of energy intake that can be more accurate than human-based estimates even with the aid of calorie information.  Keep in mind that the accuracy will improve over time and be quickly enhanced through Training Sessions.

LUMME’s kCalculator uses machine learning that improves over time based on your responses to eating detection notifications and as more sensory data is fed into your personalized AI model. The app’s Training Session function can be used to learn your more unique eating gestures to speed up this process.  We encourage you to conduct a short Training Session to personalize your app right from the start and focus on the particular foods and/or plate settings that it has trouble detecting.

Your Meal Diary is your record of detected eating episodes, as well as a place to manually enter calories if necessary.  A meal diary record is automatically recorded when eating is detected.  The Meal Diary is an easy place to review the times that you eat, make any adjustments.

Your Weight Tracker is a simple tool to keep track of your weight. If you’re using the kCalculator for a self-help weight loss program, entering your weight on a regular basis can be helpful to track progress and keep your calorie estimates as accurate as possible.

Mindful eating is the practice of eating with purposeful awareness. Volumes have been written about the importance of mindful eating, its benefits and how to do it, but the Mindful Eating tab guides you through the process. Use the Mindful Eating tab as a 20-minute meal companion to help you master the skills of pace, bite-size, and greater enjoyment of your food.