Take To Fun

We’ve talked about the HAPIfork project during CES 2013, and it seems like it is ready for the next step since its team has started seeking funding through Kickstarter after a rather successful awareness campaign. Hapilabs, the company behind this concept is seeing $100,000 from the public, which represents about 1000 prospect customers for this smart fork. Given that contributions range from $89 (the minimum to receive the product) to $1500, this looks very doable, but this will be the ultimate test which shows if the initial impression can now be converted to real user intent.

If you are not familiar with HAPIfork, it is a fork equipped with a capacitive sensor. It can tell how fast you’re eating since each bite would trigger a contact between your lip skin and the sensor.

Additionally, the final fork design should also be equipped with a motion sensor to augment the bite count accuracy, as the capacitive sensor can be accidentally triggered by a metallic knife for example. By double-checking the fork’s motion and the contact data, Hapilabs should be able to precisely count the number of bites. Once the data is gathered, you can connect the fork to a computer and to Hapilab’s cloud service to check your progress and other statistics about your eating pace.