A 20-minute jog around the neighborhood. That’s the plan for today. And you’ll get right to it—once the episode of Sonny with a Chance is over, once you finish this convo with your friend and just once you get around to it.
The voice in your head tells you to get to work but it’s tough to get motivated on such a slow, lazy summer day. Sound familiar? We’ve all had those days. Well now that voice in your head might be going virtual!
According to the
Los Angeles Times, University of Southern California researchers are hard at work trying to motivate teens to get off the couch and get exercising, using a method with which teens are all too familiar—texting!
The basic idea is that a wireless body network would transmit signals from your body and analyze them. If you wear the device, part of KNOWME Networks technology, it would use many different factors and be able to tell if you are walking, running or doing other forms of physical activity. Neat, huh?
The next step? The device alerts the network of your inactivity and the next thing you know, you have a couple text messages on your phone telling you to get moving!
Currently, researchers are working out kinks (it’s not waterproof, for example), but the project is well underway. They’ve been motivated by statistics that reveal how many obese teens there are nationwide. They’ll start small—a few dozen teens will use the device—but hope to expand the technology as well. And it seems like others think it will work too; the National Institutes of Health just gave the study a $1 million grant.
What about you? Do you think this technology will help? Is it addressing a real problem? How often do you say you’ll exercise but then get distracted?
So how do you resist the temptation to lie on the sofa day after day? What’s your motivation to stay fit?
-Miliana Budimirovic