No ratings yet.

In Germany, almost every second person is currently on a diet or has tried dieting before (“Statista,” 2018). However, most diets are not really successful and people frequently gain even more weight that they had lost before, as researchers from UCLA found (Wolpert, 2007). One of the main reasons for diets not working is, that diets are inconvenient for most people and while it is possible to adjust one’s behaviour for a period of time, it is hard to do so for a long period and people tend to fall back into old behaviours.

Studies have shown however, that diets are almost twice effective, when people are using a food diary while doing so (Svetkey, 2008). Also people tend to keep their positive weight loss results, while keeping a food diary. However, keeping a food diary is still lots of work and is difficult, especially when eating out and not knowing about the ingredients.

In order to make food diaries simple, fun and effective, French developers have created an app called “Foodvisor”. Foodvisor entered the market in 2018 and has received international attention in the media (GMA Team, 2019). The app promises to detect your food by simply making a picture of it, a process that is nowadays anyway in the routine of many smartphone addicted people. The app then compares the detected ingredients of the meal to a database and recognises the nutritional facts and stores them in a digital diary.

The app is making us of machine learning, to detect the food. A vast amount of pictures of food has been categorised in a dataset, on which an algorithm has been trained (Dillet, 2019). With this method, the app recognises food, spread out on a plate quite well, as long as it is rather separated. For mixed foods with a sauce it is not working that well (I’ve tried it myself). However, the app has another cool feature. In order to rightfully determine the ingredients, the app also has to estimate the correct amount or weight of the food. It does so by using camera autofocus data, which is using the distance to the plate together with lots of historical data, in order to make this estimate (Dillet, 2019). The app promises that the entire process to record a meal takes no longer than 5 seconds, which makes is almost hassle free for the user to use (“Foodvisor.io,” 2018).

I am excited which other innovations will come along with the new technologies in the future and what other areas of our lives will be affected by it.

Bibliography

Dillet, R. (2019, October 14). Foodvisor automatically tracks what you eat using deep learning. Retrieved October 16, 2019, from TechCrunch website: https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/14/foodvisor-automatically-tracks-what-you-eat-using-deep-learning/

Foodvisor.io. (2018). Retrieved October 16, 2019, from Foodvisor.io website: https://www.foodvisor.io

GMA Team. (2019, January 16). When you eat matters as much as what you eat, authors say in new book. Retrieved October 16, 2019, from Good Morning America website: https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/wellness/story/eat-matters-eat-authors-book-60395882

Statista. (2018). Retrieved October 16, 2019, from Statista website: https://www.statista.com/statistics/988089/share-of-people-who-have-tried-a-diet-to-lose-weight-in-europe/

Svetkey, L. P. (2008). Comparison of Strategies for Sustaining Weight Loss<subtitle>The Weight Loss Maintenance Randomized Controlled Trial</subtitle>. JAMA, 299(10), 1139. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.299.10.1139

Wolpert, S. (2007, April 3). Dieting does not work, UCLA researchers report. Retrieved from UCLA website: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Dieting-Does-Not-Work-UCLA-Researchers-7832

5/5 (1)

If you have recently travelled to a major European city outside the Netherlands or to the United States, you will have most likely come across one of the thousand of e-scoots that have been flooding the streets recently. The public opinion about this new solution for the last-mile transportation is mixed. Some people love having the ability to quickly hop on a scooter and save some valuable minutes, while others are annoyed, because they are blocking the sidewalks and the streets get even more crowded. But lets have a look at the environment and evaluate if this option is really as eco friendly as advertised:

As the name suggests, e-scooters are entirely powered by electricity, which suggests gives them a big advantage over cars, busses or normal scooters, when looking at the emissions created while driving. However, a study conducted by the North Carolina State University shows, that the energy consumed during the lifecycle of a scooter only accounts for less than 5% of the overall emissions, an e-scooter releases. The majority of the CO2 emissions stemm from the production and transportation. Especially the manufacturing of the lithium-ion battery and the frame of the scooter accounts for 50-70% of total emission of the scooter. Since most scooters are manufactured in China, the scooters have to be transported to Europe or the United States, which accounts for another 3% of the scooters environmental footprint (Hollingsworth, Copeland and Johnson, 2019).

However taking all these factors together, using an e-scooter is still a lot more environmentally friendly than using many other last-mile transportation options, including car, bus, train and metro. A good indicator to compare these options, is the CO2 produced per person kilometre (g /pkm), meaning the amount of CO2 produced per person per kilometre in each mode of transportation. The website epowers.org found, that e-scooters are much more environmentally friendly with 46 g / pkm compared to cars (140 g /pkm), busses (75 g / pkm) and the metro (65 g / pkm). The value for e-scooters is taking into account the manufacturing, transport from China and electricity for an e-scooter. If the scooter was to be produced in Europe, this value would be even lower (Epowers, 2019).

However, this picture is only one part of the truth. Since most people don’t own their own e-scooter, but make use of one of the many scooter sharing companies out there (Bird, Lime, Tier), another significant component needs to be added to the equation. Since users of these services, don’t charge the scooters themselves, transporters operated by the rental companies, have to drive around the city to collect, charge and redistribute the scooters every night. With a range of only 15-20 km per charge, every scooter has to be picked up basically every day. In addition to that, some cities prohibit scooters from being in public areas over night, which forces companies to even collect and store fully charged scooters every day (Short, 2019). This accounts for another 20-40% of overall CO2 emissions of the overall scooter, according to Hollingsworth, Copeland and Johnson (2019). In addition to that, a scooter has a much shorter life span, when being driven in rental, compared to a privately owned one (Hawkins, 2019). These factors significantly weakens the eco-friendliness of the scooter and makes it less eco friendly compared to taking the bus or the train. However, it still produces only half of the CO2 emissions of a car (Hollingsworth, Copeland and Johnson, 2019).

Concluding, e-scooters are by themselves certainly a fast and environmentally friendly alternative for last-mile transportation. However, renting them in the current business model diminishes the positive eco score.

What is your opinion on e-scooters and how will they evolve in the future?

 

Sources:

Epowers. (2019). E-Scooter CO2-Bilanz: Eine wissenschaftliche Studie zur Ökobilanz. [online] Available at: https://www.epowers.org/elektro-scooter/co2-bilanz/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].

Hawkins, A. (2019). Electric scooters aren’t quite as climate-friendly as we thought. [online] The Verge. Available at: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20751610/scooters-electric-dockless-carbon-emissions-study-life-cycle-analysis [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].

Hollingsworth, J., Copeland, B. and Johnson, J. (2019). Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dockless electric scooters. Environmental Research Letters, 14(8), p.084031.

Short, A. (2019). Atlanta Bans E-Scooters at Night After Drivers Kill Four Riders. [online] Streetsblog USA. Available at: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/08/12/atlanta-bans-e-scooters-at-night-after-drivers-kill-four-riders/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].

Image: Britta Pedersen—picture-alliance/dpa/AP