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Microsoft's New Smart Bra Could Stop You From Over Eating
walterbyrd writes "A team of engineers at Microsoft Research have developed a high-tech bra that's intended to monitor women's stress levels and dissuade them from emotional over-eating. The undergarment has sensors that track the user's heart rate, respiration, skin conductance and movement — all of which can indicate the type of stressful emotions that lead to over-eating, according to Microsoft researchers. The data is sent to a smartphone app, which then alerts users about their mood."
Time to reboob.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Many of us guys that visit Slashdot could use a bra. Too bad it doesn't run Linux.
I'm actually pretty amused by the sensor rigged bra - heck, I wear a bra to run in anyway, way better than a separate heart rate monitor. Though no proprietary MS crap for me ;-) (Can't imagine they provide decent support, y'know?)
But it seems horribly tone deaf to decide to put their sensors in a bra, and then make the whole thing be about dieting. Please folks, try not to be assholes.
Steve Ballmer could model it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'm hungry!
Hi, I'm your bra assistant. It looks like you are hungry. Would you like some diet advice?
(o) Yes (o) no.
At least that'd explain Clippy's pervert-on-the-playground look...
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Damn it to hell.
Fat shreds memory and cognitive function, in often imperceptible ways but the effects do build over time. It increases an individual's chances of acquiring diabetes, heart disease and a number of other maladies. It is responsible for increased fatigue and reduces the efficacy of the immune system. People suffering from obesity, and that term applies much sooner than most would like it to, tend to be less productive, cost their family and employers more, and die sooner.
No, it is not appropriate to attempt shame someone over it. No, it is not justifiable to treat the individual as less than any other. This I am most decidedly against. However, fat is not something to be "accepted" as if it were a lifestyle choice; even if the war is never won, the individual should always fight. Regardless of the origin, be it stress, overeating, hormone imbalance, etc. Fat is something to fight. It is a medical condition and infinitely treatable.
It's one thing when a man, or woman, is bound to a wheelchair for life due to a condition one cannot correct from birth or from an injury or from disease. It would be quite another if that man, or woman, is bound to a wheelchair because they refused to do the physical therapy. I mean, we would all give the person their space after whatever event brought them to that point. We would all give them time. But at some point, you would lose respect for them, wouldn't you? Their apathy would be off-putting. Now imagine they wanted you to "just accept it".
The individual who is fighting deserves all the respect the individual who has won should receive. I would never grant the individual who refuses to fight that and nor should you. As for the fight, this bra is simply a tool to aid, in however limited way it may, that battle. It is not fat shaming. They're trying to help; they're not being assholes.
I say this as someone who has spent a lifetime fighting, and my war rages on.
The fundamental problem with this is that overeating doesn't cause obesity.
Some recent scientific results (*) have clarified obesity, and are completely at odds with every "common knowledge" explanation. The bad news is that we don't know what causes obesity and there's nothing anyone can do [currently] to combat it. The good news is that it's not related to a) what you eat(**) b) how much you eat, c) your willpower, d) genetics, or e) exercise.
Relax, it's not your fault.
In the current model the digestive system presents a river of nutrients, from which the body takes what it needs to maintain a specific weight.The body has a set-point in the manner of a thermometer for how much nutrition to take in, and something in the environment disturbs this set-point(***), resulting in obesity. There is strong statistical evidence that this is not related to the amount or type of food eaten(*) (within dietary reason) or the level of exercise. Over 700 possible factors have been suggested, including Bisphenol-A in packaging, estrogenic compounds in the environment, and water fluoridation.
Your diet worked for you, and that's great; however, it didn't fix your obesity(***): something you did along with the diet changed the environment and your body regained a normal set-point. For this reason, no diet is universal: it's happenstance.
Exercise isn't what fixed your obesity. Again, nothing related to nutrition (within obvious limits) or exercise is the cause of obesity. Something else is at play. Whether exercise is good for you is a different issue; it's just not the cause of your obesity.
Modeling your body as a thermodynamic system sounds logical and "makes sense", but without actually going into starvation it's not the correct description of the problem. You can burn many calories simply by sleeping with fewer covers (more than you can by exercising), but your body will simply take more from the stream. This won't affect your obesity.
* Modern-day laboratory animals are fat, despite having the same diet and exercise as lab animals raised in previous decades. Statistically, the trend is very strong.
** A nutritional balance is necessary (of course). Whether junk food is good for you is a separate issue; however, it's not the cause of your obesity.
*** The difference in caloric intake between normal and obese is about 30 calories/day (about 3 peanut M&Ms), which is roughly 1% of your daily nutritional needs. No diet has this level of resolution, no diet can be this accurate by measuring servings without taking into account the condition of the serving (ie - chicken fattier than average, veggies drier than average, &c.)
Dude... I'm dying over here.
That would be the perfect user interface design for such a device. Nipple.Navigation(tm)
Apple will introduce an iBra that you can automatically unclip with an expensive iPhone app only.
Microsoft will then introduce a Windows Bra that is functional but unexciting, and be slightly irritating to operate.
An open source Linux powered bra will subsequently be developed, but it will take so long to fiddle with until you achieve the desired result that you end up forgetting what your goal was in the first place.
So is this going to have a touch interface?
Gives a whole new meaning to TouchPoint.
How the hell are you being tagged as insightful? You whine - and yes it is a whine - that they are being assholes because they dared to release a female-specific product to help women manage their weight when women face an image problem and yet, you so devalue why they did it.
Here's the tone: they are trying to help. Again: they are trying to help. The keyword here is help. Whether or not the product is gender specific is irrelevant. Whether or not there is an image problem out there or not is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether this is a tool that will help people manage their weight and it is.
They're taking advantage of what's available. In this case, women wear bras. It's a way to make the monitoring invisible. It's a way to not single anyone out. You say, "for heaven's sake don't only make it for women", so you would rather they not use the fact that most women wear bras in order to aid the health of women? You would rather discard any tool that would by its very nature have to be gender specific, because it was gender specific? If not, what the hell are you saying?
As for the image problem. I'm well aware of it. But God almighty, more are dying by not doing anything about their weight than those over-correcting by orders of magnitude.
Here is how women died in 2010:
http://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod/2010/index.htm
You won't find eating disorders or poor self esteem. This is not to say that these aren't serious issues, but the means to do so is certainly not ignoring weight. (Which plays a HUGE role in the number one killer of women, heart disease.)
Nipple.Navigation(tm)
I can imagine the headline now:
"Apple sues Microsoft over smart bra. Claims rounded bra corners and white color violate design patents."
They clearly haven't looked at this from the users perspective.
I don't want some device telling me I am emotional and stressed and shouldn't be eating. Fact is I would probably smash the device after a while.
Of course on top of that, it hurts my emotional and stress levels to be told that I am emotional and am stressed out.
The whole thing is one big fail.
DO NOT buy one of these for your wife or girlfriend. In fact, don't ever acknowledge that you're aware of its existence.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."