Microsoft patent aims to predict your About-to-Eat moments, tell you to skip that cookie

When Microsoft announced the Microsoft Band they promised the wearable would do a lot more than fitness tracking but would know your life inside and out and provide advice in even non-exercise related roles such as stress and sleep management.

In the end, that promise did not come to fruition, but some recent patent applications suggest Microsoft has not given up on being your life coach.

Microsoft’s latest wearable patent claims to be able to detect when you are about to eat something. The tech, which is powered by a set of sensors, will be able to detect whenever they are about to eat (and possibly drink) something when the user is carrying it or have it attached to their body. The system will be leveraging a whole range of different sensors, including accelerometers, a gyroscope, and even the electromyography sensors.

Using machine learning which Redmond is calling it the “about-to-eat moment classifier,” the system could then be able to communicate with your smartphone to provide health-related information — and it could also possibly ask you to, uh, not eat something based on your health statistics and recent fitness activities using the JIT “eating intervention” system.

This new system will likely take years until it makes it to a real hardware. Microsoft could incorporate this system to its future Microsoft Band devices, if and when it actually makes a new Band, of licence out to a partner such as Fitbit.

With the obesity epidemic already cutting years of life expectancy all around the world hopefully we will see such technology reach the mass market sooner rather than later, and then the only question remaining would be if you are more likely to listen to the little voice on the wrist than the one in your head.