
The list of components and code for making the system are both available. This new wearable system only requires two small sensors on the leg, a battery and a portable microcontroller (a small computer), and costs about $100 to make. Such setups are used to assess health and athletic performance, but they involve bulky, uncomfortable equipment and can be expensive. There are laboratory-grade systems that can accurately estimate how much energy a person burns during physical activity by measuring the rate of exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen in breath. (Consider how a cup of coffee can increase heart rate.) The researchers hypothesized that leg motion would be more telling – and their experiments confirmed that idea. population and found that it does very well, with about one third the error of smartwatches,” said Patrick Slade, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Stanford who is lead author of a paper about this work, published July 13 in Nature Communications.Ī crucial piece of this research was understanding a basic shortcoming of other wearable calorie counters: that they rely on wrist motion or heart rate, even though neither is especially indicative of energy expenditure. “We built a compact system that we evaluated with a diverse group of participants to represent the U.S.
#CALORIE COUNTER DEVICE FOR FREE#
A system made with two inexpensive sensors proves to be more accurate than smartwatches for measuring calories burned during activity – and the instructions for making the system yourself are available for free online.
