We are close to a revolution in the cutlery we use to eat. Basically, these cutlery have not improved in anything significant in recent decades, but, beyond new shapes, materials and textures, the next step could be utensils that interact with the food itself .
HAPIfork and Gravitamine
An example of this is a fork that vibrates to let you know that you are eating too fast, something that is not healthy. It is a first prototype of HAPIfork , a Japanese fork designed to modify our eating behavior.
The Hapifork is responsible, among other things, for measuring the rate at which we are eating, it counts the time it takes to finish chewing food, the number of times we put the fork in our mouth and it also controls our meal times.
A more interesting example is Gravitamine , which is capable of creating the illusion of weight in the user’s hand . The taste of food is not limited only to the sense of taste, but it also changes according to other perceived information, such as the auditory, visual, tactile senses, or through individual experiences or cultural backgrounds. With this tool, then, it is hoped that by changing the weight of what we eat, we also feel different and relate to that food in a different way.
Another market where interactive cutlery could have a future is that of patients with difficulties controlling hand movements, such as Parkinson’s patients, whose tremors can cause food to drop. An example of this is Liftware , although its stabilizer can be attached to coffee spoons, soup spoons, forks, keys, etc. The tool is equipped with sensors and small motors that help to automatically re-balance the position in the opposite direction to the shaking. With this system we managed to cancel or control 70% of the tremors .