Need something to help you eat more slowly and lose weight? There’s a fork for that. The French company, HAPILABS Ltd. came out with a fork that vibrates if you are eating too fast. The HAPIfork measures the length of your meals, how many forkfuls you eat and length of each bite. The goal is to increase the time between bites, giving your stomach more time to fill up. During meals, the fork sends data back to the smartphone app that goes with it to show your progress. It also offers suggestions about how to change your eating habits.
Chris Taylor of Mashable put the fork to a reality test. Here is what he found.
The first thing Taylor realized was that the fork needs personalization. The automatic time between bites is set at 10 seconds. If a bite is taken sooner than that, the fork vibrates to train the user to eat more slowly. Unfortunately, it’s very easy to cheat this system. Because the fork’s sensors are triggered only when the user’s mouth touches the sensors, Taylor discovered that:
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“You can trick the fork by spearing something large and grabbing the food with your teeth without getting the tines near your choppers.”
However, he also pointed out that this defeats the purpose of the fork.
Another tricky bit is the different time intervals of the fork. The hardest level, set at 60 seconds in between bites, can make it difficult to eat a warm meal without having it get cold.
Eating more slowly than usual can also throw the device off a bit. Taylor reported:
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“I was eating too slowly to start with, and had to speed up to see if the fork was working at all.”
The HAPIfork isn’t some magical device that will automatically make you lose those few extra pounds. Like most technology, it still takes a little time to get used to. To live in harmony with the HAPIfork, you should probably still read the manual.
