Fitterfly Partners with Google Cloud to Launch AI Meal-Tracking Feature for Diabetic Patients

The partnership introduced a new AI feature, Fitterfly Klik, designed to assist people with diabetes and other non-communicable diseases (NCDs) track and analyze their meals efficiently.

Fitterfly, a Mumbai-based healthtech startup, in partnership with Google Cloud, has launched an AI feature, Fitterfly Klik. This will assist diabetic and NCD patients in tracking and analyzing their meals efficiently.

Established in 2016 by Dr Arbinder Singal & Shailesh Gupta, Fitterfly specializes in digital therapeutic programs for managing diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

The startup raised $16.6 million in a Series A funding round in 2022, with backing from industry giants such as Amazon, Fireside Ventures, 9 Unicorns, and Venture Catalysts.

Utilizing AI for Diabetic Care

Nutrition planning is crucial for managing Type 2 diabetes, weight loss, and heart disease. Traditional methods, such as manual journaling or text-based input in apps, are often tedious and discouraging for many users. 

Fitterfly Klik leverages Gemini Flash 1.5 on Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform, making meal tracking quick and insightful. It aims to enhance this process using AI and computer vision.

“Klik makes meal logging possible in a few seconds, even with multiple dishes on a plate. Multimodal models today are surpassing traditional image classification methods in accuracy, even on a complex problem like food,” Ammar Jagirdar, head of Fitterfly X-Labs, explained.

Fitterfly Klik further utilizes AI computer vision paired with the Fitterfly Nutrition Database, which includes over 37,000 Indian foods, to recognize, analyze, and break down meals. 

Users can access Klik within the Fitterfly app’s meal-tracking food diary by clicking the camera icon. 

Additionally, Klik can be accessed through a chat with JEDi, Fitterfly’s AI Coach. Users can take a picture while eating or upload images from their gallery later, receiving instant feedback on portion sizes and detailed nutritional breakdowns, including calorie count and macronutrient and micronutrient distribution.

“Indians eat more than 32 cuisines, and a ‘food cam AI’ was difficult to develop for identification and serving size estimation. Klik is a step towards helping millions of people make better choices and enabling better health outcomes,” said Dr Arbinder Singal, Fitterfly's cofounder and CEO. 

Moreover, Klik’s advanced algorithms analyze the food’s image and nutritional data, directly syncing it to the user’s Meal Diary on the Fitterfly app. Users can add items from the same plate if not all dishes are visible in the initial photo. 

Per the startup, validation tests confirmed Klik’s ability to precisely identify a wide range of food items and their portion sizes, ensuring accurate nutritional information for users.

Sharing thoughts, Bikram Singh Bedi, VP and country MD at Google Cloud India, said, “Combined with Fitterfly's dataset and Gemini's multimodal capabilities, both teams collaborated to identify the right model to help bring this powerful idea to life in an extremely short duration.”

Recently, Fitterfly launched FitHeart, a personalized program designed to enhance heart health. Heart ailments affect over 220 million individuals across India and remain a mounting concern, with cases of hypertension and other cardiac ailments on the rise. 

The program has been designed based on the American Heart Association Life's Essential Eight guidelines for individual users as well as for corporate entities and insurance providers.