Ikat
A food journal for eating more widely, without turning dinner into arithmetic.
Seven days · no score
Each row is a day; each square, a food group. Colour gathers where the week was varied and leaves quiet spaces where it was not.
Most food tracking counts. Ikat pays attention. Add a photo or a few words and, over time, it reveals the shape of your eating: the familiar favourites, the untouched corners, the foods that quietly disappeared. It does not count calories, rank meals or congratulate you for lunch. It notices variety, and leaves the judgement to you.
What it does
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A few seconds, then back to dinner
Take a photo or write four or five words. Portions, brands and times are optional, because a food journal should not become a second meal to finish. Most entries take less time than unlocking the phone did.
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See the month take shape
Each day becomes a row of small squares, one for every food group it touched. A month of rows reveals the pattern without reducing it to a score: the vegetables always within reach, and the ones last seen in spring.
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Advice with its workings shown
When Ikat suggests something, it also explains itself: which guide the idea came from and what in your recent weeks prompted it. Recognition results remain guesses until you say otherwise.
Process
- Problem
- Food tracking is good at counting what goes in and poor at noticing how narrow a diet has become. Variety is the harder thing to measure, and the thing almost no tracker sees.
- Current bet
- Combine photo recognition with explainable logging against several dietary guides, so the app can be specific without dressing a guess as certainty.
- Hard problem
- Make recognition useful without letting uncertain inference harden into fact. A confident wrong answer is worse than no answer at all.
- Status
- Prototype → architecture → implementation