Health and fitness apps and wearable aimed at tracking your energy input and output are more or less ubiquitous these days but this Kickstarter project is unique. Lumen is a handheld consumer device designed to calculate whether your body is in fat- or carbohydrate-burning mode by measuring the carbon dioxide concentration in your breath.

If your breath indicates, for example, that you are in fat-burning mode, the accompanying app will give you a personalised meal and exercise plan to take advantage of this.

Heavy dinners

The idea is to get to know what effects different foods (and different exercise patterns) have on your body and help you reign in the pasta heavy dinners if they tend to put the kibosh on your metabolic rate.

The start-up claims that out of its 300 beta users, they lost 6.8lb on average within the first 30 days. Although still in the prototype stage, Lumen has already raised over $2 million. It aims to begin shipping in September at a cost of $299 (€265) per device.

[ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lumen-hack-your-metabolism-lose-weight#/Opens in new window ]