No pain no gain? Wristband provides electric shock to help banish bad habits

Be it sleeping in or skipping the gym, everyone wishes they could kick those bad habits that hurt productivity and prevent physical activity. Now, a new wearable is bidding to not just track activity, but use pain and shame to ensure users have no choice but to reach their goals.

Due for release in 2015, Pavlok is a fitness tracking wristband which also serves as a behavioural conditioner. Aside from the usual tracking of steps, activity and sleep, this wearable has the ability to give away your money, shame you on social media, or even deliver a 340v static shot if you slip back into bad habits. It also offers rewards – as yet unspecified – as well as encouraging social media posts if you stay on the straight and narrow.

Triallists have mainly been using the device to help programme their body to wake up earlier and carry out more exercise, although there is clearly potential for such conditioning to be applied to diet control and smoking cessation as well.

Creator of the wearable, Maneesh Sethi, acknowledges the approach is slightly unorthodox.

“Sure it might seem crazy to involve electricity,” Sethi says in the Pavlok video (see above.) “But sometimes, crazy works.”

“I want to do something even crazier. I want to use Pavlok to help 100,000 people to change one habit in just one year."

The inventor is seemingly no stranger to kicking habits the hard way – he reportedly once paid a woman to slap him repeatedly in the face every time he went on Facebook.

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