Self Monitoring Underwear

First off, get your head out of the gutter. I know what you are thinking about when it comes to self monitoring underwear and that is not what we are going with this one.

The researchers recruited 10 mildly obese and 10 lean people to wear special underwear, which used technology developed for fighter-jet control panels. Sensors embedded in the undergarments recorded their postures and movements every half-second, 24 hours a day, for 10 days.

Some 150 million lines of data were collected. Levine said it's the first time so much hard data has been compiled to show the different activity levels between lean and overweight people.

Based on the data, the researchers determined that each day, the lean subjects spent at least 150 more minutes moving in some way than the obese subjects.

I am a big fan of self monitoring devices that record data about how your body is working and allow you to see patterns that you weren't able to see before. This is a great example of this. The fat people are fat because of many small activities that they are not taking rather than a few large ones. Information like this is hard to attain without such a monitoring device.

So my only question is where can I get my hands on a pair of underwear like this (damn it, get your head out of the gutter again). Am I one of the people that makes all these little movements or am a more sedentary individual?

Levine, it should be noted, is no couch potato and certainly not overweight. He spoke by telephone while walking 0.7 mph on a treadmill in his office, where he set up a computer above the machine so he can walk and work at the same time.

That's cool. I have thought about doing something like that (more because I think walking makes it easier to think than for any weight loss implications) and am glad to see that someone is doing it. Maybe I need to hook myself up with a treadmill in my office.

via The Seattle Times