Microsoft has been dabbling in hardware for a while already. Not only with the Xbox, but also the Surface, and now Nokia handsets too. The latest from the company: smart lingerie.

The smart bra was revealed in a new paper (.PDF) from a team of five scientists at Microsoft Research, titled "Food and Mood: Just-in-Time Support for Emotional Eating." The bra wants to work to measure your emotional state via sensors built into the bra. It wants to cross reference all that with your feelings when overeating in the past, and then send a warning to your smartphone to prevent you from reaching another cookie.

"This is the first study, that we are aware of, that makes use of wearable, mobile sensors for detecting emotions," the team wrote. "The bra form-factor was ideal because it allowed us to collect EKG [activity] near the heart."



Women participating in the study had to remove and recharge their bras every three to four hours. The process, the researchers admitted was a "very tedious" one. The results were uploaded to Microsoft's Azure Cloud.

The bra could predict emerging emotional states with 75% accuracy. The bra however, couldn't detect if you were in an overeating mood.

The team's next challenge is to figure out how to build a robust, real-world system that stands up to everyday challenges with regards to battery life, comfortability and suitability for both men and women.

But men won't wear bras. Instead, it's boxers. Lots of jokes in that department we're sure.