Health & nutrition · iOS

Bioma

A nutrition app that answers the question people actually have. Not “how many calories is this?” but “how many calories is this for me, today, after everything else I have eaten?”

The problem

Food tracking falls apart at the moment you type.

Every calorie counter turns the user into a data-entry clerk. Search a database, guess a portion, choose between fourteen entries for chicken breast. Most people give up inside a fortnight, and the ones who keep going are often recording numbers that were never right in the first place.

The second problem is quieter. A calorie count is a fact about food. It is not a fact about the person eating it. Two thousand calories is a surplus for one body and a shortfall for another, and a number without that context is just trivia.

Bioma photographs the meal, decides what it is, and reports it against the person’s own daily targets for energy, macronutrients and micronutrients.

How it works

Four seconds, not four minutes

Photograph the meal, or describe it. A picture, a sentence, a voice note or a barcode, whichever is closest to hand.
The model commits to one reading. No menu of competing guesses. It picks the single most likely interpretation and picks it the same way every time, so the same meal gives the same answer tomorrow.
It asks only when the answer would otherwise be wrong. A cutlet can be fried or steamed, and the difference is not a rounding error. When the cooking method really changes the number, the app asks before it shows anything. That promise is kept by the server, not merely requested of the model.
The result lands against the day. Rings for energy and macronutrients, separate rings for vitamins and minerals, and a diary that adds up.

Why the numbers hold up

The interesting engineering is in the corrections

Packaged food is read literally

When a label is in the frame, the printed values are taken exactly as printed. The manufacturer knows the recipe, and a model improving on those figures only adds noise.

Restaurant meals are adjusted upward

Professional kitchens use more fat and more sugar than the same dish made at home. Meals logged at a venue carry a correction that reflects it.

Quantities are counted the way people speak

Two prawns means two prawns, not two grams. Grams are used when grams are what the person actually said.

Targets follow the body, not the formula

Daily goals are recalculated against the weight trend we can see, so the plan converges on the person instead of on a textbook estimate of them.

Silence is a valid answer

When the day is balanced, the app says nothing. Advice offered every single day stops being advice. Saying nothing is what makes the card worth reading when it does appear.

Ten languages, all the way through

Dishes are named in the user’s own language, with a check on the server that catches and repairs any drift into another script.

Staying with it

Accuracy is the score, not eating less

Bioma has a feed, friends and a leaderboard, and the leaderboard is built to reward the right thing. Ranking is based on how close you land to a hundred per cent of the day’s target, and going over is penalised exactly as much as falling short.

The obvious alternative, ranking by fewest calories, would quietly turn a nutrition app into a contest about eating less. That is the opposite of the product, and not a kind of harm we are willing to design into a leaderboard.

Status

Where the product is today

Platform: iOS 17 and later
Distribution: Closed beta through TestFlight
Languages: Ten, including English, Ukrainian, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi and Arabic
Your data: Bioma App Privacy Policy, including how to delete your account