What do you get when you mix the medical world with technology? Here’s one answer: a new Triangle-based startup called MedMeetsTech and its app, FoodSnap.
The women-led startup is aiming to use behavioral psychology and gamification to make being healthy easier. The company is also part of the RIoT Accelerator Program’s Fall 2020 cohort.
MedMeetsTech has only been around since May of this year, and was formed when two childhood friends from small towns in eastern North Carolina, Priya Shah and Aayushi Patel, teamed up with Nicole Lama. The three women all come from STEM backgrounds and have shared interests in wellness, health and nutrition.
Their app, FoodSnap, uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology to give users a seamless food-tracking experience.
On typical food-tracking apps, the nutrition input is tedious, and often requires exact measurements. On FoodSnap, the user can simply take a picture of their plate and upload it to the app. Two hours after the meal, the app will ask how the person feels and what their mood is. This promotes mindfulness about what the user is eating.
As users continue using the app, they are provided with data that shows how certain foods can cause different moods and physical feelings. The data is meant to inspire healthier choices in the future.
Based on their customer discovery so far, Shah believes that their app will disrupt the current food-tracking space by allowing such an individualized experience that gives power to the user.
The app is scheduled to be launched in March of 2021. It will be offered for free on the app store, but with paid premiums inside the app to allow for more features—and create a revenue stream for MedMeetsTech.
The women are currently training the machine learning classifier from scratch, and are planning to develop the product further before raising funding rounds.
By being a part of the RAP cohort, the company is hoping to gain a better understanding of their user-product fit.
“We’re overall super-excited to bring tech that we, as women, wish we had growing up,” Patel said.
