About Ozer App Demo...

Download Ozer from Play Store

Why Use Ozer

Use OZER if you want to monitor your daily calorie intake, exercise, and intermittent fasting, and how it affects your weight. OZER collects and groups corresponding information by month (a maximum of 12 months of history will be maintained).

You can list the food items you have consumed for a meal in a free-form statement. The app will recognize the food items (matching them to the best ability with items from your customized food list), split them, and calculate calorie intake. The prerequisite is for everybody to customize the food list.

Please note that exercise activities are recorded and maintained by the application in a similar fashion, but the list of exercise activity types supported by the app is not customizable. Use the 'personal training' option if the application is not able to match the activity you are trying to enter.

Voice & Usability

You can use voice to dictate or type natural language statements (multiple food items or exercise types at once, but without portion sizes or exercise times, only descriptions).

As for portions or exercise time, default values are used at first when you dictate. You can always update them via keyboard after the initial voice entry.

Integration with Google Assistant for recording food intake per meal and for logging exercise is implemented in Ozer as well. If you choose to use Google Assistant, you can say, for example: "Ask Ozer to log that I ate baked salmon and rice for dinner." As for exercise entry via Google Assistant, you can say: "Ask Ozer to log that I walked for half an hour."

Testing revealed, however, that when I dictate the whole meal list, Google Assistant might not delegate this entry to Ozer, but instead would show web search results.

Personal Food List

OZER comes with a general food list split by food categories. 70+ food items, mostly fruits and vegetables, for end-user convenience, are preloaded. In order to streamline daily calorie intake logging, extend the food list by entering food items of your choice.

Most of us use approximately 40+ food items (food dishes); therefore, some time (measured in minutes) has to be invested upfront. Ozer provides assistance to address this requirement. In order to ensure that the food list can be extended quickly, Ozer generates a dynamic web link based on food description, selected portion type, and size.

Generated link will lead to a Google search result. The number of calories mentioned in the search results can be entered to complete the food item entry. Thus, food or dish entry relies on 4 simple steps: enter food description by voice; select portion type and size, press the link, review the results, return to OZER, and enter the calories.

Please note that Ozer can only provide an approximation for the daily calorie intake. While the numbers will not be exact, seeing these numbers against BMR provided me with enough control. I hope that it can be helpful for you as well.

Ozer's services certainly are not enough for people who need to measure nutritional values in a multidimensional way (e.g., protein, sodium, etc.) following prescribed medical advice.

Visual Monthly Progress

OZER will store daily captured weight, food intake, and exercise-related data for 12 months. You will be able to see for how many days in the month the information was captured/logged.

Monthly data is presented with the visual plot of weight versus daily calorie intake, minus calories burned via exercise. This view can assist in understanding your overall progress.

Intermittent Fasting Notifications

Application allows scheduling intermittent fasting notifications. It shows intermittent fasting progress in the main view, labeled Monitoring.

NLP Technique & Food Logging

NLP stands for natural language processing. In Ozer, a natural language statement containing multiple food item descriptions or exercise types is processed by recognizing and extracting them, matching them with food list items and exercise type descriptions correspondingly.

If recognition is not successful for food items, and no partial matches are found, you will be notified by a warning; for exercise type, if not recognized, the suggestion is to use the 'personal training' option.

For all recognized food or exercise items, appropriate calculations are done, and the results are available for quick and easy updates and editing.

Let us consider an example. My personalized food list contains 2 food items, both with 'cauliflower' and 'soup' in the description. If in my statement, while recording or logging food intake, there is a 'cauliflower soup', both soups will be selected by Ozer. This doesn't represent a problem, since you can remove the extra item with a simple click; it only requires extra effort. Please keep this in mind while customizing your food list. To minimize this extra review effort, unique and simple labeling of your custom food items is desirable.

Personal Story

This story is personal, and is not intended as medical or health advice. My name is Victoria Farber, and I retired 2 years ago after 40+ years in the IT industry, developing and architecting systems using various platforms, tools, etc.

I was struggling with weight management after I was approximately 30; I don't remember the exact year. The struggle progressed after I was diagnosed with autoimmune disorders. While on the job, there was not much time and energy to focus on weight loss. Because of spinal stenosis significantly affecting my mobility, at some point, I had no choice but to start paying attention to what could be done to improve the quality of my life.

I have tried almost all well-known diet approaches; they worked for a short period, and then the weight came back, adding more to my frustration.

After I retired, I decided to try to control my food intake and measure it against my BMR, knowing the limitations, of course. I just wanted to see the approximate numbers and try to be in control. I saw that tracking my nutritional intake is working for me.

First, I tried to use the available apps; I've tried a few. While I was using one of them, I realized that I needed something simpler, without all the medical advice, diets, and enormous food lists to select from. I need something easily customizable to reduce my daily effort to a maximum of a few minutes.

I want to be able to say in a free-form statement what I ate for lunch, dinner, and breakfast, and I want to be able to follow my intermittent fasting schedule. Plus, I want to compare nutrition intake growth and reduction tendencies against my weight growth, for example. So, I've created an app, a prototype app for myself, on Android. Yes, I was able to lose 10 kg in 7–8 months and keep it off.

Is the nutrition intake counting precise? Absolutely not, but it provides the ability to track my activities and be aware. I am so accustomed to my routine that I can hardly imagine how I managed before.

There are many applications on the market, created and maintained by large teams with a lot of professional advice and a variety of features. Ozer is not like that and never will be! If you are like me and want a simple, easily customizable way of tracking your daily activities, please try it. This demo version is absolutely free and has all the features I've used on my journey.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated!