The times are really interesting. If Conde Nast Publications – the publishers of glossies like Vogue, GQ and Glamour are venturing into E-Commerce, Microsoft has developed a bra that can curb stress related overeating among women.
Studies have shown people admitting to stress eating, which lead to obesity or trigger a dangerous stress-overeating-obesity-stress cycle. With more than half of those stress-eaters being women, a group of engineers and designers at Microsoft have been tinkering with a new idea: a mood-sensing bra that can help regulate overeating.
Mary Czerwinski, a cognitive psychologist and senior researcher at Microsoft, and her fellow researchers equipped several bras with a set of sensors, a microprocessor, and a 3.7 volt battery, and then gave them to volunteers to road test. A bra is a perfect device for measuring heart rate, breathing, skin conductivity (sweating), and movement as it is close to the heart. The sensors beamed the information to an app on their smartphones and, over time, the Microsoft team could determine factors that predicted a bout of stress eating.
The idea is that by acknowledging one’s stress-eating triggers, the wearers can curb overeating tendencies. Microsoft is still working on the Smart-Bra as the battery life in trial run was as low as four hours.
However men have to wait much longer to have a Smart-Inner to curb overeating. Microsoft experimented with men’s undies but it didn’t work. “We tried to do the same thing for men’s underwear but it was too far away [from the heart],” said Czerwinski. Well if you have Man-Boobs, you can go for the Smart-Bra!