Wouldn’t you like to know the mental boost you get from your morning run or your evening powered with down dogs?
Popular Footwear and apparel brand ASICS has devised a new smartphone-based tool that aims to help you understand the impact of exercise on your mind.
The company worked with bioinformatics company EMOTIVE and Dr. Brendon Stubbs, a mental health researcher at King’s College London, to develop this new tool.
Mind Uplift from ASICS is a new tool that allows you to track the effects that you actually get from exercise.
Using a combination of facial scanning technology and self-reported data collection, the tool will allow everyday athletes to see the impact of sports on their own minds, capturing the impact of different exercises across these 10 emotional and cognitive metrics.
This new tool takes a reading of emotions and brain function pre-and post-exercise and shows you the impacts.
Interestingly, the theory sounds good, but the approach sounds a little gimmicky without an EEG reading.
You start with scanning your face, followed by answering a series of questions before starting your workout. Once your workout is complete, you repeat the process of face scan and answer a series of questions. The tool calculates a percentage based on this.
‘With exercise playing such a valuable role in maintaining our mental health and wellbeing, it is more important than ever that people can see and understand the positive link between the two,’ said Dr. Stubbs. ‘Our preliminary research findings outline the profound impact that something as simple as a 20-minute run can have on our minds.’
ASICS plans on creating a ‘World Uplift Map’ using the data collected across the world. The dynamic map will take all the mood data from exercisers worldwide and display it by region, allowing us to see the collective mood of cities, nations, and the world as a whole.
The visuals show as lighter or darker, depending on the mood, with the resulting maps a way to register benefits or your efforts at a glance – and to inspire us to get out there and move.
