If you are a lady and you are worried about how you will resist the abundance of festive food this Christmas, then Microsoft may have the answer for you.
Girls, forget the "Smartphone", now you can put the "Smartbra" on your Christmas list! This handy new device will ensure that you stay off Santa’s "naughty" list, well, at least when it comes to breaking your diet.
The Smartbra , which was designed by Bryan Goldberg, the creator of the website for women, " Bustle", claims to help female dieters break the cycle of “emotional overeating” by using sensors that monitor heart and skin activity to give an indication of the wearer’s mood. The results from the monitor can be fed to an app on the woman’s phone that sends her a message if she is stressed, and which then encourages her not to visit the refrigerator or biscuit barrel to "comfort eat" by sending affirming messages such as "You’re calm" or "You can handle it". It also keeps watch for physical signs of ennui which might bring on boredom binges.
Computer scientists at the University of Rochester in New York and the University of Southampton in the U.K., have released a paper this year describing how the product could work:
"Sally has been home from work for a few hours, and she finds herself rather bored. An application on Sally’s mobile phone has also detected that she is bored by reading her physiological state through wearable sensors. Since this mobile application has previously learned that Sally is most susceptible to eating when she is bored, the application provides an intervention to distract Sally and hopefully prevent her from eating at that moment."
How ladies might feel when their bra pipes up in polite company and persuades them that the extra helping of plum pudding is a bad idea is not covered in the paper, but it might make for interesting after-dinner conversation. One wonders if its capabilities could stop there, and whether in the future, ladies’ underwear could be programmed to do even more useful tasks, such as yelling out when they have had too much to drink, or even detecting suitable body chemistry in potential mates.
Certainly talking underwear could no longer be called our "unmentionables" when it could have more to say than its wearer.
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