Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. have come up with their own healthy spin on what the office of the future will look like. Here's a hint: It involves treadmills, walking tracks and losing weight on company time.

Instead of sitting on conventional desk chairs, workers in the Mayo Clinic's prototype environment stand at their desks with a moving treadmill surface underfoot. A two-lane walking track surrounds the workstations and serves as an aerobic substitute for a conference room. (There are pictures of it here. Dr. James Levine and his colleagues in the Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) lab at Mayo Clinic came up with the idea and built the prototype environment in their own office space. Ten acrylic standing computer desks, complete with variable-speed treadmills, have replaced traditional desks. Employees wear mobile phones on their belts, along with a device that measures how much time they spend standing and sitting.

"This is a fully functioning office. My entire staff works here," said Levine, an endocrinologist, in a statement. "The idea is to introduce an environment that will encourage activity in the workplace. Just as it's hard to be a couch potato without a couch, it's hard to sit all day at work without a chair or a conventional desk or cubicle."

The prototype desk - which costs about $1,000 - stands vertical and can be used with a treadmill, exercise bike or regular chair. It's modular and mobile, so it can just as easily be used in a home office as a corporate setting.

And the payoff? Using the desk at 1 mile per hour will burn about 100 calories per hour. Levine recommends users start slowly by walking 15 minutes every hour and during all phone calls, then sitting at the desk for the remainder of the time until stamina increases.

While a treadmill-workstation combo clearly isn’t for everyone, the idea of the future office is something that affects all of us, whether we work at a corporate site or in our homes.

There are all kinds of technologies available to help enterprises support teleworkers, from remote access and administration tools to wireless networks and VPNs. Savvy companies are accustomed to deploying such gear to stay connected with offsite employees. However one area that can be neglected is the remote employee's physical work environment.