Remember those late night infomercials that sold gadgets to give you a six-pack without having to “do anything”? They’d just zap your muscles with current and these would contract and do all the work “by themselves.” The SmartMio is sort of like that, but there’s a smartphone involved. There’s also presumably a little more tech involved in order to make this more legit than the cheaper, older devices of the 90’s. The excessive quotation marks are there to denote that as much as the stimulation for muscle contraction is external, you will still feel tired after a while; you’re still doing the work, you just have less control over it. Anyway, with the SmartMio you can choose between 14 different muscle groups to work out, and isolate them exclusively, which is hard to do with traditional training.
As gimmicky as this sounds, there appears to be some scientific studies backing up the principle of ElectroMyoStimulation (EMS). You can read a few here and here. And if you want to get your own SmartMio, you’ll have to pledge $89.
[ Project Page ] VIA [ GadgetReview ]