Simple’s new nutrition scanner makes it easy to find health info at restaurants.
Simple
On its website, the team at Simple has a simple elevator pitch: its app “mixes the magic of AI, the power of science, and the convenience of tech so you can reach your weight loss goals with less stress.” The basic premise is that using one’s smartphone is an easier, more effective (and more accessible) to track one’s eating habits and ensure their nutritional goals are being met. The software, which is available on iOS and Android, even has a personal assistant called Avo that helps with individualized guidance and recommendations and more.
Ro Huntriss, who’s based in London, is a registered dietician and Simple’s chief nutrition officer. She explained to me her background working with Britain’s National Health Service, or NHS, during which time she helped people with weight loss, diabetes management, and more, were crucial to informing her duties at Simple. Having worked in the health tech arena for the last 7 years, Huntriss told me “a huge benefit of health technology is that we’re able to support people on scale” and that her team at Simple includes an internal science team and an external scientific advisory board. She said her team is responsible for guiding the strategy for the business, telling me she works to ensure everyone is doing the right thing by users in terms of safety, effectiveness, and most crucially for health, scientific accuracy.
“We help in terms of product development and getting our features as optimized as we possibly can to support our users on their journey towards their weight and health goals,” Huntriss said.
As to the app itself, Huntriss told me after launching the app, the first-run experience consists of a series of questions for a person to answer. The software uses the information, she said, to learn about the person and build a personalized plan for them. The key component of Simple’s app is what Huntriss described as self-monitoring and tracking, whereby a person can log data about the food they eat and more. In this way, Simple is highly similar to one of the many hydration-tracking apps on the App Store such as WaterMinder. The conceit behind the self-monitoring philosophy is to nudge people to become more mindful of their behaviors; a trend in action, Huntriss said, can “lead to changed behaviors.” Another aspect of heightening awareness is the Simple app’s NutriScanner. Announced at the end of January, and exclusive to iOS in US English, the feature enables users to scan restaurant menus in order to glean nutritional information. According to Huntriss, NutriScanner creates a color-coded nutrition score that helps people better understand their food options; this, she said, can prove powerful for a person who’s “really fixated” on maintaining their goals for a healthier lifestyle. Huntriss called obesity and weight gain persistent global issues, saying the whole point is to contribute in some small way a solution to getting people to think more critically about their body and overall health.
“That’s our driving mission,” Huntriss said of Simple’s ethos. “We want to improve health through nutrition and support people to reach a weight that’s healthy for them—which is not only going to give them personal benefits, but it also means that it’s going to improve a wide variety of variation in terms of implications on health. Ultimately, it helps people to live longer, so we want people to live longer, healthier, happier lives, and it inspires us daily. We love doing what we do.”
From a disability standpoint, what Simple does with its app—particularly with the scanner—is interesting. For people with certain conditions, such as diabetes, who may need to track their food intake closely due to interactions with medication and the like, that Simple helps track consumption can be beneficial. Likewise, the scanner can help inform someone of the meal choices they make as part of said tracking. Moreover, from a technical perspective, that everything is done via one’s smartphone means getting nutritional information and more can be more accessible than reading a printed label. This is especially true when you consider many in the Blind and low vision communities, for example, use features such as VoiceOver and Zoom on their iPhone. The combination of a handy scanner plus the system-level accessibility features make for a killer combo that makes Simple’s work that much more effective because it means a greater swath of people can access it.
To the point on better accessibility, Huntriss was keen to emphasize that modern technology has enabled healthcare to be more accessible in myriad respects. Specific to Simple, she said the company has users who are in their 70s using the app. She added digital health is profound because “not everyone has the luxury” of accessing regular care via in-person meetings. Even wearable devices like Apple Watch, Fitbit, and more, help make care more accessible with their bevy of sensors.
“I think offering things like that hugely heightens accessibility of better health to people… I think people are quite excited about it,” Huntriss said. “Most people are attached to their phone in one way or another, and it can be very simple to log things a few times a day. It can really make a huge difference. We find from all the analytics we do that the more people use the app, the more likely they are to lose weight or the more weight they lose. We know [the technology] works.”
When asked about feedback, Huntriss told me the company’s users seem to be “really happy.” There are so-called “Simple advocates” all over the world, as well as a highly active Facebook group. In addition, the Simple website boasts the app has been downloaded over 15 million times and has garnered more than 300,000 5-star reviews.
“We pay real attention,” Huntriss said. “We talk to our users… we don’t just make decisions internally. We have a whole user research department where people are purely focused on speaking to our users and understanding how we can improve things and [identifying] features we should be developing. It’s a really important part of what we do.”
Looking towards the future, Huntriss said she and her team at Simple are “hugely ambitious,” telling me she’s excited to see the impact Simple’s app may have on the global obesity curve. She went on to say the company is excited to start taking a more holistic view of weight loss, as things like sleep and stress levels are also known factors. Huntriss declined to give specifics, but offered these other considerations would be part of Simple’s product roadmap for the future. All told, Huntriss expressed excitement for Simple, telling me “we want to continue to reach more and more people and we’re excited about that journey.”
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