Fund This: SITU Smart Food Nutrition Scale

Whether you're diabetic, have high blood pressure, another health condition or just want to keep an eye on what you eat, sometimes it's necessary to count calories and keep a careful eye on the food you put in your body. The SITU Smart Food Nutrition Scale, nearing the end of its Kickstarter campaign, promises to help with that by maintaining a Bluetooth pipeline straight to your iPad.

The SITU scale weighs your food to help give you an accurate idea of calories, salt, sugar, vitamins and minerals in the foods you eat, using an app on the iPad that communicates with the scale via Bluetooth. The app uses a simple drag and drop interface to help you identify the foods you're eating as you weigh them.

The app also accommodates pre-measured ingredients that you probably can't easily get on the scale, such as spices, sugar and oils. It doesn't require you to register online to use — SITU isn't dependent on any sort of cloud service or online database to operate.

Michael Grothaus, a former Apple employee turned technology journalist, developed the SITU scale and software because of his own weight loss struggles; he used a food scale and a complicated 800 page nutrition book to keep track of his calorie intake, losing 100 pounds in the process. An increasingly busy lifestyle and work demands impeded his ability to use his old manual system, and SITU was the result.

SITU's rounding the end of its Kickstarter campaign. With 5 days to go, they're within sight of their goal - £33,742 has been pledged, £35,000 was the goal.

Peter Cohen