“Can this spoon help Japanese people eat less salt?”

The technology honored with the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize is now available in a consumer item: an electrified spoon. This Reuters video report tells about it, with the headline “Can this spoon help Japanese people eat less salt?”:

That Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to Homei Miyashita [show in the photo above] and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

They documented their research, in the study “Augmented Gustation Using Electricity,” Hiromi Nakamura and Homei Miyashita, Proceedings of the 2nd Augmented Human International Conference, March 2011, article 34.  doi.org/10.1145/1959826.1959860