Ruh-roh: Your smart food scale and fitness tracker are talking to each other

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The folks at The Orange Chef prepare lunch in their San Francisco offices with smart scale PrepPad.Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
The folks at The Orange Chef prepare lunch in their San Francisco offices with smart scale PrepPad. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

This may be the last time you feel good about walking half a mile to get a cronut: a calorie-counting food scale and fitness tracker are on to you.

Smart food scale Prep Pad now synchs with Jawbone Up, keeping track of what you’re eating and how many calories you are burning.

It’s latest buddy system in the quantified self movement, where, as we reported earlier, your car is already conversing with your fitness tracker about how much you should be hoofing it instead of driving. Sales of fitness gadgets like the Jawbone Up, Fitbit and Nike + are over the previous year, leaving us with 19 million trackers and trainers strapped to our wrists.

Analysts expect that number to hit 111.9 million gadgets by 2019, but the speed bump on the road to victory, they say, is the smart accessory segment, which is “not quite ready for prime time. That may change with Apple’s iWatch, which may sport sweat sensors and integrate with your home computer, iPhone and maybe even AppleTV. Until then, there’s a race to see who can survive among the fitness trackers and smart internet-of-things devices.

“Now users can take a holistic approach to their fitness routines and eating habits with their newly found ability to conquer daily health goals,” said Michael Tankenoff, chief marketing officer of Orange Chef, maker of Prep Pad. For every meal you make with the scale, you can caliber your personal nutrition needs against how much physical activity you’re getting.

At the Orange Chef headquarters, where employees make healthy lunches for each other daily weighing the options with the company’s scale, they’ll now have an extra nudge to take the stairs to the penthouse where they work.

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