Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon highlights another case of your tax dollars at work for a questionable purpose.
The federal government helped finance the creation of a so-called “diet choker” that monitors the eating habits of the wearer.
WearSens, created by engineers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), is a necklace that can automatically detect when a person is eating or smoking, and can send alerts to a smart phone telling the user to stop.
The invention received a $148,379 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2013 to create a sensory necklace to “fill the need of automatically detecting swallows and eating patterns.”
Researchers at UCLA, led by Majid Sarrafzadeh, the director of the Embedded and Reconfigurable Computing Lab of the university’s computer science department, released the findings of a pilot study on the necklace this month.
CBS News called the invention “slightly odd.”
