Fitness trackers are one of the most popular applications of digital assistants. Now, the popular lifestyle application Lifesum is partnering with Google Assistant to help users tailor their diet and exercise routines with voice-based tracking, instructions, tips, and challenges.
Lifesum announced that it’s launching an app that uses Google Assistant to help users log meals and water intake, track exercise, and monitor body weight. Just say, “Hey Google, talk to Lifesum,” and users can use their voice to issue commands like “Track a glass of water,” or “Track a medium breakfast.”
Users can log all of their primary meals in a variety of sizes as well as snacks. The intuitive app even offers tips based upon the meals and water consumed, such as tips to alleviate heartburn after that Saturday night blowout or how to sleep better if you overdid it during the Super Bowl.
Much like Weight Watchers, Lifesum is designed to help people who want to lose weight, maintain their current weight, or even to gain weight in the case of people who aren’t prone to maintaining a healthy weight. The tracking feature is designed to give users a better and richer understanding of their diet by encouraging them to log more of what they eat and drink.
“We have a strong human tendency to avoid doing things that cost your brain energy and time and just maintain the status quo, and so using voice as a tool makes tracking much easier and simplifies the user’s journey toward a healthier lifestyle,” Lifesum CEO Henrik Torstensson said in a statement. “With our Challenges, we set a low bar for our users and hold their hand as we slowly raise it. The reward of accomplishing these daily actions has a lasting, positive impact on people’s self-confidence and reinforces healthy behaviors.”
With Challenges, you can tell Google Assistant while Lifesum is active, “Give me a challenge,” and Lifesum will ask a few questions, like whether you’re at home to get a contextual understanding of what might be a fitting game for you right now. It might be as simple as “Fill up your water bottle and put it somewhere you can see it,” or a mental twist like “Take a few minutes to rearrange your kitchen shelves and get the sugary stuff out of sight.”
Naturally, there is a broader view of one’s progress as well. Users can ask for an overview of their progress and see the number of calories they have consumed during the day, how many they need to eat to reach a target, their last recorded body weight, and their weight goals. It’s kind of a nifty package to help people stay on track to hit their targets.
According to a 2018 study by Elsevier, dietary self-monitoring is a key component of successful behavioral weight loss interventions and is essential for facilitating other behavior change techniques.