EurekAlert! Science News, Oregon Health & Science University from
… The study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that when people used such monitors without a specific goal in mind, their physical activity declined and their heart health did not improve. This lack-luster performance was despite 57 percent of study subjects thinking their activity had actually increased.
[Luke] Burchill recommends meeting with a medical professional such as a primary care physician to establish goals catered to specific health needs.
… It has about 3.5GB of storage for Music. Though technically, that’s actually for Music, your workouts, and any apps you have. But realistically those non-Music things only take up a few MB in total (.001 GB). Technically the unit has 4GB, but half a gig is taken by the system. Garmin estimates about 500 songs can be stored.
A new watch from fitness specialist Suunto wants to let you know it’s okay to miss a workout and will even replan your exercise routine accordingly.
The Suunto 3 Fitness has new adaptive training guidance that sets you up with a series of sessions after it considers your fitness level and exercise history.
… In the first quarter of 2018, the ring will receive a significant feature boost. First off, you’ll soon be able to actively start recording data at the start of workouts in order to more accurately track your Active Minutes and better manage your weekly exercise regimen. The company also plans to add Apple Health integration so that the Motiv plays nicely with your existing health monitoring system. And when you’re really killing your workouts, the Motiv system will soon be able to broadcast your exercise achievements across social media.
Most excitingly, the Motiv ring should work with Android OS by the end of the first half of the year! What’s more, outside of the Apple Health integration, all of the features listed above will be included once the update goes live. July can’t come soon enough.
… researchers claim three applications are made possible with these magnetised clothes. Data storage, imaging and gesture recognition could all be capable with just the swipe of a shirt cuff.
The pioneering approach to this clothing technology could be used to encode data such as door pass codes, imprint images on smart fabrics and embroider magnetised thread to link gestures with smartphones. The gesture technology had an accuracy of 90.1% and recalls data even after washing, drying and ironing. This highlights the potential durability of material technology.
However, the researchers came across a speed bump when they realised that the magnetic patches weakened over time. After a week the magnets lost between 28% to 36% of its original field strength, but never completely demagnetised.
… On the consumer product side, Leibowitz and Rob Le Bras-Brown, global head of digital health at Nokia Technologies, both said that this means creating, for instance, fitness wearables that are low friction and appealing to the customer. Further, Le Bras-Brown continued, these devices need to deliver a tangible insight to the consumer that can lead to prolonged behavior change if they are going to provide any value.
“Those need to deliver more than just data, they need to deliver insights, and that’s the big shift that we’re chasing — giving people a metric, an insight so that they can then act on and hopefully lead to behavior change,” he said. “Unfortunately that behavior change isn’t sticking, and so we try to make our products as engaging as possible.”
This movement goes beyond devices. In another session, representatives from UnitedHealthcare and Rally Health talked about how they are using data to create services that make the healthcare process more palatable to consumers.
With thousands of companies exhibiting at CES, you see all sorts of things across a wide array of viability levels. Some stuff you see you’ll know will be a hit. While others it’s just a matter of time before not just the product, but the company folds.
But then there’s the stuff in between – the stuff that might have a future, but the pathway isn’t crystal clear. A perfect example of that is Spire. The company is at CES this week showing off their semi-permanent, semi-disposable biometric sensors that will monitor your heart rate, track steps, and do all the other glorious things that your average optical HR sensor watch will do…except, it doesn’t require a watch be worn.
I say ‘semi-permanent’ because it can be removed from clothing, but it’s not really designed to be. And I say ‘semi-disposable’ because it’s designed to last about 18 months, versus just being a one-time wonder. But once the battery dies, it’s throwaway.
GROUP '18- Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork from
Physical inactivity is a global public health concern.
Community-based interventions that use strategies such as
competition and cooperation, with group dynamics-based
strategies at their core, are effective at improving individual
physical activity behaviors, but they often rely on
participants to actively seek out fitness information
themselves. This work examines how technologies such as
smartwatches that are designed to raise awareness of
personal and group fitness can encourage positive fitness
behavior within and across peer groups. This paper presents
a study about smartwatch use by 27 people as part of an 8-week community physical activity intervention program
with elements of competition and cooperation, seeking to
understand fitness awareness and behavior of the
participants. Results indicate generally high awareness
levels of smartwatch information. In particular, members of
most successful groups exhibited significantly higher
awareness for feedback displayed on the smartwatch. [pdf]
No visit to the doctor’s office is complete without a blood-pressure cuff squeezing your arm and a cold stethoscope placed on your chest. But what if your vital signs could be gathered, without contact, as you sit in the waiting room or the comfort of your own home?
Cornell University engineers have demonstrated a method for gathering blood pressure, heart rate and breath rate using a cheap and covert system of radio-frequency signals and microchip “tags,” similar to the anti-theft tags department stores place on clothing and electronics.
The cracker-sized tags measure mechanical motion by emitting radio waves that bounce off the body and internal organs, and are then detected by an electronic reader that gathers the data from a location elsewhere in the room.
The system works like radar, according to Edwin Kan, professor of electrical and computer engineering. But unlike most radar systems that rely solely on radio waves to measure movement, Kan’s system integrates “near-field coherent sensing,” which is better at directing electromagnetic signals into body tissue, allowing the tags to measure internal body movement such as a heart as it beats or blood as it pulses under the skin.
GoPro is in the process of laying off around 200-300 employees this week, TechCrunch has learned from sources close to the company. The hits to the company were largely concentrated in its aerial division, the segment of the company responsible for its Karma drone.
In a letter to impacted employees GoPro explained these cuts are part of a larger restructuring “to better align our resources with business requirements”.
TechCrunch has been informed by sources that the company relieved impacted employees of duties today but will keep them on the payroll until February 16, likely planning to hold this news for after CES and perhaps tie it to an upcoming earnings report as in past instances.
… Like the Peloton cycling bike, the Peloton Tread will stream live daily classes — up to 10 a day, with 7,000 available on demand — on a 32-inch HD touchscreen attached to the treadmill. These running classes are led by real instructors, just like its current classes. But Peloton says the Tread isn’t just about running; it’s supposed to offer cross training-style classes, too, as well as guided hiking and walking workouts.
Unlike traditional treadmills, which often have a series of buttons that require a forceful touch to change settings while you’re working out, the Peloton Tread has two large knobs. The treadmill’s belt is made up of 59 shock-absorbing slats, for a cushioned feel, and there’s a sound bar that gives it surround sound (on a treadmill!).
When Olympic skiing champion Lindsey Vonn needs custom-fitted workout clothes or cross-training shoes, she contacts Under Armour, her longtime sponsor.
“I’ve got a 3D body scan,” Vonn said, “so whenever we need to make something custom, like a new turtleneck, they can get that going.”
Most of the rest of us have not submitted to 3D modeling, in which sensors take intricate measurements that allow clothes to be made that drape just right. But Baltimore-based Under Armour — like rival sports brands Nike and Adidas — is banking on a growing consumer appetite for shoes and apparel that look or feel as customized as a built-in cabinet.
“We see customization and personalization as the new expectation from consumers, really,” said Dave Dombrow, Under Armour’s chief designer. “It’s a very important topic to us.”
… While there are metrics you can use to guide your jacket purchase, there isn’t one perfect jacket to suit everyone’s needs. “Some people run hot and other run cold,” says Woody Blackford, vice president of global design for Columbia sportswear. “There are other factors, too, like how active you are. You need a different jacket to stand at the bus stop every day than you do to go out running.”
Almost every winter jacket has three main components: an outer shell, insulating fill, and a lining. Here’s a breakdown of each piece.
Smart footwear maker Sensoria has teamed up with British barefoot shoe maker Vivobarefoot for a smart running shoe.
Debuted at CES, the Vivebarefoot Smart Shoe monitors speed, pace, cadence – but also uses sensors woven into the sole to keep track of how you run. That means that foot landing spot, ground time and impact score are also part of the long list of metrics you receive.
Anyone who’s suffered a running injury may appreciate these numbers and stats more – but focusing on these can also prevent lay-offs. If you really want to get serious, you’ll also find asymmetry and toe engagement as well.
The sensors are threaded through the sole of the barefoot shoes, and for anyone who’s ever run in trainers with that low profile, you’ll know that’s fairly impressive. All the processing is done by the removable and chargeable sensor – the Sensoria Core – that streams data to a paired smartphone.
Unlimited by the lifetime of a battery, this combat boot uses footsteps to power a GPS transmitter providing geographical coordinates over a cellular network. Optimally positioned lungs in the sole of the boot drive miniature turbines connected to generators, providing usable electric power on the order of 10s of mW when walking. The boot can help locate friendly forces in critical combat situations, aid in locating the missing, and prevent misidentification of individuals in unfamiliar areas — all powered by walking.
Joan Rojas is the inventor of seamless headwear. On a motorcycle tour through northern Spain in 1991, the passionate biker had the idea when the wind blew unpleasantly around his neck.
When his experiments with microfibre textiles were successful, he founded Original Buff in his native city of Igualada, near Barcelona. The company has been developing multifunctional headwear since 1992 and describes itself as a global market leader.
… Sailors and pilots are taught to detect ships and planes at a constant bearing and to take avoiding action. When it comes to drivers, however, things are very different, because almost all motor vehicles have a design flaw which means not only that a CBDR condition precedes a collision, but that unless (as we shall see) the driver does one of two things, the same condition means that the driver will never even see the phenomenon occurring.
That design flaw is the front ‘A’ pillar, at the edge of the windscreen.
… In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business. What they’re selling is metrics. It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts—then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.
Around this time last year, we published an article ranking U.S. states by the number of runs recorded on Strava. Predictably, the two most populous states, California and Texas, took the top two spots on the list. There were some surprises—Colorado, only 21st in population, came in at number four—but, for the most part, a state’s place on the list correlated pretty closely with its number of inhabitants.
That’s why we decided to make things a little more interesting this year. We ranked the fifty states, along with D.C. and Puerto Rico, according to the longest average distance per run. The data below reflects Strava stats between October 2016 and October 2017.
So you’ve got your Fitbit over the Christmas break and you’ve got some New Years Resolutions. You go online and see the graphs on your dashboard but you’re still not pleased. You want more data, more graphs, and more information. Well say no more, because I’m going to teach you how to collect your own Fitbit data using nothing but a little Python code. With this tutorial, you can get your elusive minute by minute data (also known as intraday data), which is not readily available when you first get your Fitbit.
… Since Fitbit began tracking sleep stages in March 2017, it has collected data from 6 billion nights of its customers’ sleep. This is a gold mine — by far the largest set of sleep data ever assembled. (This data is anonymous and averaged; it’s not associated with individual customers’ names.)
“It’s a really, really exciting and really rare data set,” Fitbit data scientist Karla Gleichauf says. “It’s probably the largest biometric data set in the world.”
The measurements include not just how long you sleep, but what stages of sleep you experience. Each morning, the Fitbit app shows which parts of the night you spent in REM sleep (the vivid-dreams stage, good for mood regulation and memory processing), in deep sleep (good for memory, learning, the immune system, and feeling rested), in light sleep, and awake. (It’s always disheartening to see how much of the night you waste in little one- or two-minute wake-ups that you don’t even remember.)