A Pennsylvanian developer Brian Mueller has designed a new 'talking' smartphone app that shames people into counting calories and losing weight through hideous fullscreen ads and tweets.
The CARROT Fit or its latest reincarnation, CARROT Hunger, which sell for 2.99 dollars and promise to "make getting in shape suck so much less," are marketed as a "hilarious talking weight that will inspire, bribe, ridicule, threaten and insult you into losing weight," News.com.au reported.
Mueller promises that users will "quake in fear of punishment" if they eat too much as Overeat and CARROT will serve up brutal punishments like bribe requests, hideous full screen ads, and tweets that will shame you in front of all your social media pals.
The app, which translates what has been eaten into calories and then tells users how long or how much they would have to walk to burn off that food, enables users to scan barcodes to determine the food's nutritional value and to watch their avatar grow and recede as food is consumed and burnt.
It also includes an Apple brand transmitter iBeacon that helps smart phones determine their approximate location or context, which can be placed on the fridge and sound an alarm when it detects the user eating more than their goal allows and it yells "get your flabby body moving, meatbag!"
Jonthon Freeston, Sydney University's exercise expert, said that being yelled at to exercise is not an effective motivator as no one likes getting yelled at.
Freeston added that although this may work for a small subsection of the population, there are real problems associated with the assumption that punishing people works, suggesting that physical activity is a very complex behaviour made up of three factors: the individual, social and the environmental.
