So if I’m trying to lose 10 pounds, I’d like to know whether that additional piece of lasagna (or bite of spinach or whatever) would put me over my calorie intake goals for the day. Sometimes I misjudge… I still feel hungry so I keep eating, for example, or I assume one bite of a brownie couldn’t really be that bad (especially if it’s from someone else’s plate). I’d love some hard data that would tell me I’d already reached a pre-set limit.

Just as importantly, though, I’d like this tool to go about its business unobtrusively and with little input from me. I’d like to be able to see it when I want to and not see it when I don’t, and be able to re-program it to meet a variety of goals. There certainly are ways to do this sort of thing now, like through Weight Watchers or similar programs. But I’m just not willing to sacrifice the time and effort required to log my meals or weigh my portions–I would love a tool to help me do that (maybe through a voice and image recognition interface?).

Whether trying to manage our diets, live with diabetes, or any number of other conditions, I suspect many of us want the same basic thing out of our health tools — we want them to make it easier for us to meet our health goals with minimal interference in the rest of our lives.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a program that would let us log our sugars, insulin/meds, carbs, exercise, and whatever other mitigating factors and use that info to make suggestions on changes in treatment? I’m surprised that hasn’t been done so far, actually…Most of us try to make those determinations ourselves, or with our endos, but really it should be easy enough for a computer to make the same kinds of calculations faster, and maybe better. It would definitely also help patients, like the guy in the above article, who don’t understand what they’re supposed to do with the numbers.