Despite all the related problems which contribute to obesity¹ such as stress, the main cause is... eating too much. Recent studies have shown that people tend to overeat when they are stressed out – often creating a negative cycle of eating more, gaining weight and then getting stressed out about gaining weight – especially during the holiday season with Thanksgiving and Christmas.

 

"We eat not just because we are hungry and craving² nutrients³, but also for a host of emotional and habitual⁴ reasons. There is no single term that encompasses⁵（包含，围绕） the combination of lifestyle, hedonic, emotional, or habitual over-eating that leads to obesity."

 

When traditional methods pretty much failed, scientists started thinking out the box, designing new, innovative⁶ ways to help anxious overeaters get rid of this habit, or at least be more aware about it. Along with stress and eating apps engineers and designers at Microsoft Research recently invented a stress-busting bra made with special material that monitors the wearers moods and helps reduce stress eating.

 

"It's mostly women who are emotional overeaters, and it turns out that a bra is perfect for measuring EKG (electrocardiogram)," said Mary Czerwinski, a cognitive⁷ psychologist and senior researcher in visualization⁸ and interaction at Microsoft. "We tried to do the same thing for mens underwear but it was too far away (from the heart)."

 

The stress monitoring bra, which was initially⁹ presented at the Society for Affective Computing¹⁰ conference was recently tested by a group of volunteers, who reported getting accurate information about their moods. The results seem promising¹¹ enough to see it on the shelf in the near future, especially considering that it's probably going to be pretty cheap. Microsoft built it with a standard microprocessor¹² powered by a 3.7-volt battery. It's able to simultaneously¹³ monitor up to eight bio-signal channels simultaneously, according to Czerwinski's research paper, "Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating".

 

The sensors¹⁵ track heart rate and respiration¹⁶ with an EKG sensor¹⁴, skin conductance with an electrodermal activity sensor, and movement with an accelerometer and gyroscope – and they can do all of this from a bra. All this information can, when taken as a whole, accurately¹⁷ depict¹⁸ if the user is stressed and stream the results to a smartphone app or a computer.

 

The only bad thing is that the battery life is pretty small – they only last for about 4 hours, and then they have to be changed, but researchers are currently trying to find a way around this – they're trying to find alternative ways to monitor these parameters¹⁹, in a way that requires less energy.

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