About 35 percent of the adult U.S. population is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Active Desk, a start-up at the U, believes combining desks with cycling can change unhealthy lifestyles and combat obesity.
“Because many office workers are required to work at their computer all day, they’re essentially required to be sedentary. They might want to be active but they’re restricted,” said Jim Martin, professor of exercise and sports science and creator of the Active Desk.
Martin was inspired to create the Active Desk after attending a conference in 2011 that delved into the health risks of being sedentary. Martin designed the Active Desk to break the major barriers that usually keep people from exercising.
“You don’t need any extra time because you’re at your desk anyway,” Martin said. “You don’t have to worry about how you’re going to look because what we advocate is not heavy exercise. It’s very gentle pedaling — it’s pedaling that doesn’t make you sweat or breathe hard so you’re not going to look funny.”
He said although many people don’t find exercise exciting, the boredom of it is negated because you’re completing work while you work out.
“Exercise might be boring, but you’ve got a job to do so you might as well pedal while you’re doing it,” Martin said. “Then you don’t have to do it after work because by the time you get home, you’ve had a full day at your Active Desk and you’ve burned 700 to 800 calories.”
The expected price of an Active Desk is just under $2,000, costing slightly more than a sit-down desk and highly ergonomic chair. The Active Desk requires a substantial up-front investment, but Martin hopes that after considering all the health factors, consumers will see Active Desk as the most cost-effective option of all.
“If you instead think about it not as an office furniture piece but as an element of corporate wellness that changes the equation, because, depending on what study you read, you will find that every dollar spent by a company on wellness returns between $2 and $6 back to the company,” Martin said.
Prototypes of the Active Desk have been built and some users have reported 20- to 30-pound weight loss after a few months of use. Although the results and experience of users have been positive so far, more development needs to be done because the process of conjoining the desk and bike is not as simple as it might seem.
“Having a cycling workstation work well for you is really an adventure in three-dimensional puzzle problem solving,” Martin said.
As the Active Desk team continues development, it requires more funding. Lately, the team’s main source of funding has come from crowd-funding website RocketHub. Using this site, Active Desk reached its goal last week of raising more than $10,000.
MBA student Josh Dunford is working with two other MBA students to design a business plan for Active Desk and help it gain national traction.
“Working in smaller companies, you have the ability to make strategic decisions for the company, which is something that’s kind of appealing about the start-up world and start-up culture,” Dunford said.
So far they have been instrumental in obtaining feedback from demo users and have worked with a public relations firm to get Active Desk mentioned in Forbes, Marie Claire and AARP magazines.
Martin is working with the Marriott Library toward the possible placement of a few Active Desks on its main floor.