National Institute of Health officials are spending more than $2.1 million to develop shoe insoles and special buttons that track a person’s weight.
It’s part of the federal government’s growing battle against obesity, which one of the recipients of the NIH funding claims “continues to increase and has reached epidemic proportions.”
The insoles are being designed by SmartMove, a Fort Collins, Colo., firm that bills itself as providing “personal physical activity coaching solutions that make it easy to develop daily healthy activity habits.”
SmartMove got $1.3 million from NIH to create shoe devices that monitor a person’s weight, physical activity and other factors, according to the Washington Free Beacon, which first reported the grants.
“Our long-term objective is to develop a simple, inexpensive, unobtrusive device that can easily be incorporated into conventional footwear and can accurately measure body weight, posture allocation, physical activity and daily energy expenditure,” SmartMove said in its grant application on the NIH website.
“Such a device could be used to quantify and modify physical activity and lifestyle behavior in overweight and obese individuals and others with sedentary lifestyles.”
The buttons are being developed by the University of Pittsburgh’s Laboratory for Computational Neuroscience, which received an NIH grant of $766,667.
The lab said in its grant application that it is creating “a new electronic device which has the potential to produce a technological quantum leap in the measurement of diet and physical activity. This button-like device, eButton, will be worn naturally on the chest using a pair of magnets or a pin.”
The eButton would include record a person’s eating, drinking and smoking activity, and be linked to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency database.
“The primary goal of this research is to develop an advanced, button-like electronic device (eButton) that can be worn naturally on the chest,” the lab said in its grant application.
“This device will contain a powerful microprocessor, a novel eating detector, a pair of cameras and a variety of electronic sensors to automatically, jointly and objectively measure energy intake and expenditure, as well as environment and behavior related to diet and physical activity.”
According to the WFB, “in one scenario for uses of the button, the button tells a person ‘No way!’ to chicken nuggets because they had already had 1,000 calories.”
“The university also argues that the button could be used for ‘monitoring the elderly’ with the AARP, and for police officers to wear as badges. The university touts the button as a device that ‘never sleeps.'”
Mark Tapscott is executive editor of the Washington Examiner.
