It’s tough to calculate how many calories are burned through a normal daily routine, or even how many are burned while most of us sleep in bed. Some students from Georgia Tech, however, have made it much easier.

Through the invention of a device called the HappyHR, users easily can take note and measure just how many calories are burned off on a daily basis during any type of activity, even sleeping as mentioned above.

The device rightfully is named after the brief period where endorphins kick into the brain and body allowing users undergoing extreme exercise to feel bliss, which is also known as the “happy hour”.

Twenty-one year old Garret Langley, the project leader has commented, “It’s a completely converged device, it’s a single unit that provides complete fitness monitoring and management.” Langley is a senior in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The device is the size of a small rectangular wrist watch and can be worn either on the wrist or the ankle. It uses a combination of information about the users heart rate, and amount of exercise to determine the total caloric burn-off throughout the day. The data can then be transferred via Bluetooth technology to a PC where users can match up and analyze their caloric statistics using special software.

Langley is working to manufacture the HappyHR device and make it available to average consumers by sometime in fall 2009. He is projecting a retail price for the calorie measuring unit somewhere in the $100 vicinity.

Langley also commented that, “Ideally, this could change the way America stays in shape.”