Kassandra de Jong

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Staying in shape, small figure, healthy lifestyle those are all words that have been in our society over decades. When I was a young kid I remember my mom going to a loose weight shop and a dietician would talk with her, give her exercises and a food schedule. The food schedule mainly consisted of eating Modifast or Herbal Life 2 times per day and a decent meal as a third meal. For the rookies, Modifast and Herbal life are some sort of liquid, jelly, soupy thing that any normal person would not even consider of eating it or calling it a meal. The only way to receive Modifast or Herbal Life was by entering the store and buying it from the dietician.

Nowadays the market is taken over by a lot of different online stores or apps that are also focused on losing weight and helping customers to get (back) in shape. For instance Personal Body plan or the Body and Fit shop. They are both online stores that focus on the healthy body. They have different business models but do serve the same customer.

Personal body plan developed an application where customers can sign up on and have their personal page where customized information is displayed. Personal body plan assigns a coach to every customer that signs up on their website. This coach will stay in touch with the customer and take track of the developments of the customer. The coach develops a plan for the customer that is completely customized to the wishes of the customer. If they want to lose weight it is a different program than if they want to gain muscles. Besides training schedules, they also offer food schedules which will help the customer with their goal. This is all done through an app, no physical contact is needed.

Body and Fit for instance is a shop that focusses on offering different types of protein. A very hot item nowadays is the protein powder, to gain muscle or to for quick recovery. These items where basically not available for the general type of people, only athletes could use them and it wasn’t legal up till 1994.

We can see a big shift from seeking local help from a dietary in a store to online applications that helps you take track of what you eat and when you eat it and also which exercises will suit you best.

https://personalbodyplan.com/

https://www.bodyenfitshop.nl/

85 A.B.A. J. 60 (1999), Hard to Swallow; Higgins, Michael

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Nike released their brand new Nike HyperAdapt 1.0 also known as the self-tying shoe. Of course this raises the question, what is this innovative self-tying shoe? Well, it is exactly as it says a shoe that will tie himself around your foot without you having to do anything. How do you wonder? Let’s explain this.

The self-tying shoe becomes alive whenever you put your foot into the shoe. At the moment you place your foot in the shoe the shoe will shape himself around your foot. Whenever the shoe feels some sort of tension in certain areas of your feet, the shoe will stop tightening. The bottom of the shoe exists out of a ‘bottom plastic house’, this plastic case consists of a charger (since the shoe works on batteries) and fly wires that comes up through both sides of the shoes, which makes it able for the shoe to wrap himself around your foot.

This does not mean that whenever you put the shoe on and it is wrapped around your foot that you cannot change the tightness. So whenever you feel the urge to loosen or tighten the shoe, this is possible by pressing on one of the buttons on top of the shoe, its located near the tongue. One of the button will tighten the shoe the other one will loosen it. So whenever you engage in a certain sport and you feel that your feet get swollen, it will only take you one or two seconds to change the tightness or looseness of the shoe by pressing on one of the buttons.

Since these shoes work on electronic it is important that you charge them on time otherwise the shoe will no longer work. There are certain lights on the shoe that indicate the amount of fuel that is left in your shoe. The blue colour means that the battery is fully charged, the yellow colour means that you only have a few more days left before you have to charge them and the red colour means that it’s a ‘charge now or run out of battery situation’. The batteries last for about 2 weeks and it takes 3 hours to charge them.

We can state that this a great innovative project which will ease the life comfort of many people. Especially people with disabilities will greatly benefit from this new technology. It is stated that the shoe might even prevent people from injuries because it reacts on tension part of the feet. But as dr Hatfield says ‘If your feet are not healthy, there’s kind of a chain reaction, and your entire body can get out of whack’. So this shoe might actually do more than just wrapping itself around your foot.

But if you look at this in perspective it does raise the question are we just being lazy that we do not feel like tighten our shoes ourselves of will this really reduce injuries and therefore increase the healthiness of the people?

Sources:
Wired(n.d.), https://www.wired.com/2016/09/nike-self-lacing-design-hyperadapt/. Retrieved on 21-09-2016

Griffin, A.,(March 2016), http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/nike-hyperadapt-10-company-launches-real-self-tying-shoes-a6936291.html. Retrieved on 21-09-2016

Facebook (September 2016), https://www.facebook.com/wired/videos/10154013698188721/?pnref=story. Retrieved on 21-09-2016

Healthy lifestyle due to Technology

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The shoes of the future, or just laziness?

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