Learn English in Jakarta, lose weight in Tokyo; with your cellphone

Stuart Corner
Monday, 29 November 2010 13:39

Your IT - Mobility

Mobile applications are getting increasingly ambitious. Indonesian telco Telkomsel is offering English lessons via SMS, but for technical complexity Japanese telco NTT Com's dietary advise service takes the biscuit.

Users of NTT Com's service take photos of what they eat using their cellphone's camera, upload these to NTT's servers where some fancy algorithms developed by the University of Tokyo figure out what sort of tucker, and how much of it, is being tucked away.

The system also take location data from the cellphone and readings from its accelerometers to figure out how much walking the user has been doing to burn off those calories and make dietary and exercise recommendations.

According to NTT Com "The information will be tailored to the user's personal health goals and provided in a rich, easily understandable format using videos and other visual content."

It adds that "Before/after data and comparisons with the data of other people will help motivate users to maintain their diets and healthy habits. The service will also be linked to social networks and provide users with highly customised messages."

It all sounds very wonderful, but we do wonder how it factors in non-phone detectable exercise, like swimming or working out in a gym, or how it guarantees that users are providing comprehensive dietary information. They must surely be tempted to forget about photographing that tempting calorie-laden cookie that they just could not resist.

Meanwhile over in Indonesia PT Telkomsel - Indonesia's largest mobile phone service provider with more than 94-million subscribers - is making available on its network the Urban English Language Learning Program developed by US based Urban Planet Mobile.

The program, claimed to be a world first, will allow each subscriber to receive detailed English lessons daily to their cellphones via text messages (SMS) for less than $US5 per month.

According to Urban Planet Mobile - which claims to have "enlisted some of the greatest educational minds to design lesson plans that help people learn English" - the lessons "focus on everyday words and phrases used in a variety of social situations for the international businessman or student wanting a better grasp of daily life and language."