Jin Song Baik, the founder and the CEO of DoingLAB. (Image credit: Korea Times)

S. Korea’s health care startup DoingLAB creates an app for a healthy diet

DoingLab, South Korea-based startup is currently developing a Diet Camera – an app for people who are on diet. The company utilizes an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to encourage users in eating more healthy food and assists them to maintain their weight effectively.

The startup applies a “Food lens” inside the Diet Camera app which allows the app to able identifying food images and keep data of what the users are consuming.

Food photos from users will be recognized by the AI camera. After the camera capture images, the engineers will choose photos and gather new and old data for the update. The data collected will help the company for developing patterns to identify different types of meals.

In the beginning, the company took pictures from google, but now nearly 10,000 users upload their meal photos and because of their abundant data, the AI-powered Diet Camera able to identify more foods, said the founder of DoingLAB Jin Song Baik.

According to the company, the Diet Camera has over 5,000 different types of foods database.

However a lot of criticisms from the public said that the app can’t measure precise calories, the founder emphasized that the Camera Diet is for helping users to be more concerned about their eating habits.

The company's ultimate objective is to raise public awareness on the importance of a healthy diet, added Jin. DoingLAB will keep providing healthy recipes and various kind of foods to users.

DoingLab was established in October 2016 by Jin Song-baik who quitted from Samsung Electronics in 2015. Jin was a software engineer to develop an app for personal training and also a researcher at Samsung Medical Center.

He learned about the dietary habits of diabetes sufferers at the medial center. His experience as a software engineer and a researcher built his concern about the importance of eating behavior and food consumption.

As one of South Korea’s startups specialized in AI and health Industry, DoingLab has secured investment from Naver - the giant internet company in the country, through Naver’s project named D2 Startup Factory.

South Korea is well known for its tech-savvy. Currently, the government is encouraging business parties to combine information and communications technology (ICT) with the health care industry.

Source: http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2019/07/133_272350.html