Food Tasting Robot

One of the really scary things about NEC’s Papero robot is all the capabilities it keeps adding and what it eventually may become. We had a good look at Papero last year and we were very impressed with its English-Japanese translation capabilities in conjunction with its personality and social skills – now a new variant of Papero has been shown at EXPO 2005 in Japan and this one is a “health food adviser robot” which analyses any food you give it using infrared spectrum analysis and reports on the fat and sugar content.

All information on the robot at this time coming out of Japan is in Japanese but as best as we can understand the technology, if it has the food registered in its database, it can identify the type of food and even the brand in some cases. Most importantly, it can give you a reading on how good the food is for you, which is something that until now we’ve all had to guess at and the statistics suggest that many of us in the developed world aren’t doing too well with the guessing.

Now if they could network the new NEC robot with the bodybugg wearable body monitor that measures the calories burned by the wearer, they would have a better Gizmo.

The official press statement from NEC.