Rick Weiss

Rick Weiss is the president, founder, and chief wellness engineer of Viocare, Inc., a healthcare information technology company in Princeton, New Jersey. Viocare researches and develops innovative and scientifically-proven dietary and physical activity assessment and behavioral modification systems for researchers, clinicians, and wellness counselors. Mr. Weiss has been the principal investigator on 25 National Institutes of Health grants and contracts, valued at over $11 million. These projects have formed the basis of Viocare’s product line including a web-based dietary assessment based on the Women’s Health Initiative’s food frequency questionnaire, VioScreen, which incorporates over 1,200 food images for portion size estimation to improve results. In addition the portals Princeton Living Well and Faithfully Living Well for the Appalachia Community Cancer Network, a community wellness program that includes a centralized portal of everything healthy in the community, were created to electronically provide opportunities to assess diet, physical activity, and barriers and includes an incentive system that provides rewards with products and services from local businesses. Viocare is working on several mobile applications including the “Mobile Food Intake Visual and Voice Recognizer” funded by the NIH Genes, Environment and Health Initiative (GEI) to develop an accurate, inexpensive, and convenient new dietary assessment tool using image recognition of food photos from a mobile phone camera and VioDine, a healthy dining locator which finds a consumer a healthy menu item at a restaurant based on their nutritional needs and their GPS coordinates. Viocare’s systems have been used by major research and clinical organizations such as Eli Lilly, Nestle, The Ohio State University, Mayo Clinic, Mass General, UC San Diego, FDA, USDA, and NIH. Rick has received the Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year award, the New Jersey Small Business Development Center’s success award twice, the YMCA Healthcare Centennial award, the New Jersey Technology Council’s Mobile Health App award, and the U.S. Small Business Association Tibbetts Award. This last award honors companies that have made an important and definable difference in advancing technological innovation and economic growth through the stimulus of Small Business Innovation Research funding. Mr. Weiss has presented at numerous major healthcare conferences and published in peer review journals about new techniques for dietary assessments. Rick volunteers on several boards including the Princeton Board of Health, Princeton Future, and Dr. David Katz’s Turn the Tide Foundation. Rick started his career as an Applied Researcher at Bell Laboratories after receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Math with honors from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University.