… Software update brings HR zones to all Suunto Spartan watches
Training intensity is one of the most important factors for improving performance, and to train at the correct intensity level, you need to monitor heart rate during exercise.
This software update brings heart rate zones to all Suunto Spartan watches, providing you information about your current intensity level with just a quick glance. While exercising, you can see in real-time how long you have spent in each HR zone and how many beats you have in reserve until you move on to the next. After the exercise, a breakdown of the time in each zone is displayed in the summary.
… Patrick C. Shih, a professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington, has studied how people use technology to help themselves lose weight. He’s found that for people who are motivated to lead healthier lives, activity trackers can push them to continue.
But, he said, “If you aren’t already motivated, the tracker doesn’t help you very much.”
At CES 2018 this week, Samsung Electronics America and MobileHelp, a maker of home and wearable medical alert devices, announced a collaboration that would bring mobile personal emergency response capabilities to Samsung Gear S3 smartwatches.
Called MobileHelp Smart, the devices integrate MobileHelp’s platform into a modified version of Samsung’s watch, taking advantage of its fitness-monitoring features, GPS, and cell capabilities.
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.
With the crop of smartwatch options stronger and more varied than ever, picking out the right wrist companion has never been more challenging.
And among the best in the space are options from Apple and Garmin, despite the pair offering largely different packages. On one hand is the Cupertino company’s well rounded, stylish Series 3 smartwatch, and on the other is the headline act in Garmin’s stable of rugged tracking beasts.
But which is the better smartwatch, and how do the two compare when put head to head? Well, we’ve spent extensive time with both in order to find out where they rank. Read on to find out.
2018 brings us hope for: a new Polar tri watch (rumours of slipping dates); a new Garmin 245 (cut down 645); a new Garmin 745XT (maybe); a new Garmin Edge 630 or Edge 530; a new Garmin Fenix 5 plus; plus new XPLOVA bike computers above and beyond the already announced X5 EVO. That should be bright enough, perhaps. Shake up: Xiaomi is coming.
This is my opinion of current & future devices across the GPS running/cycling market. Updates to this will be issued as and when information emerges which may include rumors, although please note that any information provided to me under NDA by manufacturers will not appear here. So there will be a few more surprises Please let me know of errors or omissions. Thank you . Enjoy.
Others? What have I missed? Note information that has become available about accessories is NOT included below (too many of them). There are too many Power Meter models for me to keep track of. I have more than a passing interest in PMs for triathlon disciplines but I don’t keep an eye on the whole market.
… Wahoo make excellent cycling products, including the ELEMNT and KICKR. They also have a good pedigree with their innovative TICKR HR chest straps which have innovative feature like providing cycling/running cadence. I have a rather neat Wahoo Tickr-X (reviewed here). Let’s see what Wahoo’s first foray into all things optical is like.
… Tread is a beast, in every possible way. Most notably would be the price – some $4,000USD. And that doesn’t include either shipping/setup fees (nor taxes where applicable). On the Peloton bike that fee is a flat-rate $250, and I can’t imagine it’d be any lower here. Nor does it include the $39/month subscription/service fee, though most users of that are content with said fee.
But that $4,250+ buys you one heck of a system. We’ll start with the base of the treadmill, and then talk about the more tech-driven pieces up top. The main portion of the treadmill is the 59 rubber coated aluminum slats. Unlike a traditional treadmill, there is no belt here, at least not by conventional means. Instead, the interconnected slats form something akin to a bicycle chain, which the company says give you a bit of a softer feel during running (more on that in a moment).
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.
… Mimicking the fluidity, feel and aesthetics of goose down, PrimaLoft Black Insulation ThermoPlume has been developed to retain the benefits of traditional PrimaLoft insulation, remaining warm and dry even when wet. It has a 550 fill-power down equivalent.
One of the challenges in the push for wearable displays lies in finding reliable, high-performance light emitters compatible with the rough-and-ready world of woven clothing. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has come up with one candidate: a high-luminance organic LED (OLED) fiber—manufacturable using a simple, solution-based process—that can be woven into textiles and knitted garments. The KAIST researchers believe that the scheme “can realize low-cost commercially feasible fiber-based wearable displays in the future.”
It’s bad enough that we have to worry about distracted drivers looking down at their phones, but new research has found an even more vexing trend: Drivers can look straight at cyclists and still not “see” them, leading to dangerous or deadly encounters on the roads.
A recent study out of Australian National University asked 56 adults to examine a series of photographs depicting common roadway scenarios from the driver’s point of view. Some photos were manipulated to include either a motorcycle or a taxi. Overall, the volunteers were more than twice as likely to notice the appearance of the taxi as they were to spot the motorcycle. In fact, a full 65 percent indicated that they didn’t see the motorcycle at all.
… HEX Performance launched in spring 2016 and claims to be the “biggest breakthrough in laundry cleaning in decades.” [Drew] Westervelt was so sure of his product; he bet on it with one of his first major retail partners.
After meeting with the executive, he urged him to take the skin-friendly, biodegradable product home and test it out himself. The executive agreed that if HEX got the stink out of his sweaty, stinky clothes and athletic gear like Drew said it would; then the retailer would carry it in their stores.
Not happy with what you see when you look in a mirror? Well, you can take a hike.
Seriously. New research from the United Kingdom finds strolling in nature—or even looking at photographs of the natural world—leaves people feeling better about their bodies.
Three-quarters of the members of a federally chartered board advising the National Park Service abruptly quit Monday night out of frustration that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had refused to meet with them or convene a single meeting last year.
As personal informatics capabilities become embedded in more products and personal data touches more facets of life, these assumptions merit another look. How broadly do they hold up? Which use cases—and who—do they support, and which do they exclude?
In this article, I discuss some of the assumptions I have made in my own research and that I have encountered in working with my students, professionals, and other researchers. I draw extensively on my group’s work on food tracking—one of the most commonly tracked health behaviors, but also one of the most difficult to aggregate and use effectively [2]—to illustrate these assumptions, but they occur across health tracking.
This study examined the effects of utilizing a wearable activity tracker in a credit-based physical activity instructional program (PAIP) for promoting physical activity (PA) in college students. Fourteen PAIP courses in a large public university were randomly assigned into intervention (k = 7; n = 101) and control (k = 7; n = 86) groups. All courses focused on a core curriculum that covers basic exercise and behavioral science contents through lectures and activity sessions. A Misfit Flash activity tracker was provided to students in the intervention group. Objective PA assessments occurred at baseline, mid-, and end-of-semester during a 15-week academic semester. The control group showed a significant reduction in moderate- and vigorous-intensity PA (MVPA) minutes from baseline to the end-of-semester (P <.05), whereas the intervention group showed no changes in MVPA minutes over time. However, the intervention group also showed increased sedentary time and decreased time spent in light-intensity PA during the intervention period. Taken together, the present study found null effects of utilizing the wearable activity tracker in promoting PA in college students suggesting that intervention of primary using the wearable activity tracker as a behavior change strategy may not be effective to increase in PA in this setting.
In a new study of 934 mobile phone users, 100 percent said they used a mobile phone for health-related purposes, but only 28 percent used an app to track sleep. By contrast, 53 percent tracked exercise and 48 percent tracked diet.
The data comes from an online survey conducted by NYU with the help of survey management company Toluna, which did the recruitment. Verizon provided funding. The study, which focused primarily on mobile sleep tracking, was designed specifically to include both male and female respondents, as well as respondents from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds. The results were recently published in the journal Health Communication.
“In the analysis we found that the people who were most commonly reporting sleep tracking on their mobile phone were actually people that were very healthy,” lead researcher Rebecca Robbins said in a video provided by NYU. “We saw indications of high socio-economic status, but also general health indicators were very favorable among this group. People who were sleep tracking were also tracking their diet or tracking something related to a health indicator.”