A house powered by exercise?
The JF-Kit House by the Spanish design firm Elii is an experiment in “domestic fitness,” rendering “the image of a possible future where citizens produce part of their domestic energy requirements with their own physical activities.” Each room features a fancifully named exercise station that would, theoretically, help create energy to power the home, including an “arm workout bureau,” a “spinning kitchen,” and a “triceps greenhouse.” A video shows the home’s imagined inhabitant lifting weights, cycling, and doing calisthenics as part of his house’s everyday upkeep and daily chores like cooking.
The 20 best biking cities in the world
Where can you find them? Here’s a hint: Don’t look in the U.S.
Jawbone, maker of the UP activity monitoring wristband, announced today that it will acquire BodyMedia to bolster its efforts in the wearable technology space.
The UP device currently tracks more than a billion steps and 610,000 hours of sleep every day, but the acquisition of BodyMedia, a company which has been doing similar work in the space since 1999, will open the company up to a swath of new data. Just how much data? Its monitors have collected more than 500 trillion body sensor data points.
All you motivated people out there! Check this out before you drag yourself out of bed for a jog this morning!
Interesting info on the great debate: How much is too much when it comes to exercise. The NY Times had this to say:
There were, remarkably, almost no differences in fitness gains among the groups. The women working out twice a week had become as powerful and aerobically fit as those who had worked out six times a week. There were no discernible differences in cytokine levels among the groups, either.
However, the women exercising four times per week were now expending far more energy, over all, than the women in either of the other two groups. They were burning about 225 additional calories each day, beyond what they expended while exercising, compared to their calorie burning at the start of the experiment.
I’d be curious to see a similar study done on endurance, specifically.
Can’t get enough FarmVille? All that time at the computer probably isn’t great for your health. But what if you couldn’t proceed unless you had burned some calories? That’s the premise of a new gadget called Striiv.
