减肥新招：用内衣来控制饮食

最近的研究表明半数美国人抱怨他们在压力大的时候会过度饮食，这是产生肥胖的一大原因。于是会产生一个恶性循环——吃太多增加体重，发现体重增加后压力又变大了。这种情况特别容易在感恩节的时候发生。

研究者们最近发明了一种方法能帮助过度饮食的女人们丢掉这种坏习惯，或者至少能让她们意识到这种情况的发生。微软研究院的工程师和设计师们最近发明了一种用特殊材料做成的可以感应穿着者心情并帮助她们调节饮食的胸罩。

通过胸罩感应器收集到的数据，科学家们可以准确地推测受试者伴随着饮食和压力的心理变化，包括她是高兴还是难过。

感应器安装在每个女士的胸罩里，每运行四小时需更换电池。

Despite all the related problems which contribute to obesity 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 craving nutrients, but also for a host of emotional and habitual reasons. There is no single term that encompasses 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, innovative 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 cognitive psychologist and senior researcher in visualization 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 initially presented at the Society for Affective Computing conference was recently tested by a group of volunteers, who reported getting accurate information about their moods. The results seem promising 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 microprocessor powered by a 3.7-volt battery. It’s able to simultaneously 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 sensors track heart rate and respiration with an EKG sensor, 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, accurately depict 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 parameters, in a way that requires less energy.