I've noticed that overweight people tend to breathe harder than other people. Presumably this is because they have to get more oxygen/dispose of more CO2 due to having more flesh, and also because they have to move more flesh to expand and contract their lungs. It occurred to me that this heavy breathing must consume more energy in the diaphragm than normal breathing. It is also known that increased exercise can help fat people stop being fat. However, they don't seem to get enough exercise due to their natural breathing difficulty—if they did, it would serve as negative feedback, and regulate fatness to a certain maximum level.
Therefore:
I propose a trachea implant to make breathing more difficult. It consists of a silicone-covered stent-like structure with an adjustable sphincter in the middle. Airflow is made more difficult by the sphincter, causing the diaphragm to have to work harder to breathe the same amount of air, which is exercise.
The sphincter is controlled by some mechanism (probably a battery-powered electronic device that can be controlled by a radio signal from outside the body) to modulate breathing difficulty. This is so that the breathing difficulty is not always high, because presumably having to breathe extra hard all the time is bad for the lungs, so we'll give them a rest periodically. Also, during actual exercise, it would be good to make breathing as easy as possible.
In the event of any kind of failure—signal loss, battery exhaustion, circuit problem, etc.—it should open as wide as possible to avoid potentially endangering the user in case they need to breathe a great volume for some reason.
If the user inhales some obstructive object, then it can detect this with some kind of sensor and open wide to avoid presenting a small hole that's more easily obstructed. (Perhaps it should open only enough to enable the patient to inhale slowly while holding the foreign object in place, so it doesn't get inhaled past the implant, where it would be more difficult to remove/cough out.)
When the battery needs replacement (probably every few months), it's a simple non-surgical procedure to extract and replace the implant.
N/A [2018-06-09]-- notexactly, Jun 09 2018 PowerSnorkel http://www.powerdiv...roduct/powersnorkelIngenious [8th of 7, Jun 10 2018] While not terribly obese, I've given thought to "exercise" by sitting on the bottom of a swim pool: I think you can go down about 6foot before there's too much pressure to breathe through a snorkel.-- FlyingToaster, Jun 09 2018 // sitting on the bottom of a swim pool: //
You'll need some weights to counteract your slight positive buoyancy, even with your lungs empty.
// I think you can go down about 6foot before there's too much pressure to breathe through a snorkel. //
The other problem is the "dead volume" of the pipe. With a long snorkel pipe, you simply shunt the same air backwards and forwards with little mixing. Oxygen depletes, CO2 builds up; not good. What you have to have is a pair of pipes - intake and exhaust - with non-return valves.
There's a sort of power snorkel which consists of a small raft with a battery and air pump which allows prolonged dives down to about 5m.
<later>
12m, it seems ...
<link>-- 8th of 7, Jun 10 2018 random, halfbakery