Global wearables juggernaut Fitbit has announced plans to acquire Twine Health, a health coaching platform aimed at helping employers manage chronic disease in the workforce. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded out of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2014, Twine Health is a cloud-based platform that connects clinicians with patients so they can create plans and collaborate through synchronized apps toward meeting designated goals. It’s also designed to help employers cut down on their in-house health care costs.
Like many developers exploring the world of wearables, I’m an avid fan of apps that track your exercise. Companies like Strava & Runkeeper have paved the way for what we can do with motion and health data, creating new and unique experiences that attract millions of users. However, I was always frustrated that I could automatically track my runs, but I still had to enter each gym set by hand.
Can we record different exercises and classifying them? Could we see what we’ve done at the end of a plyometric workout? — how many pushups, how many jumping jacks, how many burpees? I found the answer in Core Motion, Apple’s library to glean data from the device’s accelerometer and gyroscope, and Core ML, their on-device machine learning kit.
As Fitbits and other wearable activity monitors change how regular people exercise and track their activity, they’re having similar effects on how Olympians train and recover between workouts.
It’s long been common for coaches to use video cameras to show athletes what their form and movements look like, to track progress, and to fine-tune exactly the right technique for, say, taking off for a jump or landing after a particular trick. But those only show what’s going on from the outside.
Now, wearables, biometrics and apps analyzing their data are becoming much more common for athletes at all levels, giving indications of what’s going on inside an athlete’s body. I have worked as a sport physiologist with elite athletes for two decades, including with USA Swimming and U.S. Figure Skating; there’s not yet much research about the results in figure skating, but wearables have helped coaches, athletes and sport scientists in other sports like swimming, cycling, soccer and volleyball.
Mobile devices help individuals monitor various aspects of their health and wellness, from heart rate to nutrition to sleep. Now researchers hope to find out if mobile sensor technology can also help individuals improve effectiveness at work.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame are conducting an extensive $7.9 million, 21-month study focused on working professionals in cognitively demanding positions, such as engineers, programmers and managers in high-stress occupations. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is funding the study.
“Survey assessments and qualitative observations made by researchers and supervisors have long been the way to address the question of what factors underlie outstanding performance in the workplace,” said Aaron Striegel, associate professor at Notre Dame’s Wireless Institute and leader of the study. “Using mobile sensor technology in conjunction with environmental sensors, we can now uncover in a more objective fashion basic differences that may have gone unnoticed in the way people approach their day-to-day activities in the workplace.”
Fit3D and DexaFit worked together for 18 months prior to solidify their partnership. During this period, Fit3D provided DexaFit locations with the Fit3D ProScanner — a state-of-the-art 3D body scanner that provides consumers a 3D body scan, hundreds of measurements, posture analytics, body shape rating wellness metrics, and more. DexaFit partnered with Fit3D because its 3D scanner was the perfect complement to its primary services, including DXA Body Composition analysis, VO2 Max Fitness testing, RMR Metabolic testing, and several other medical-grade services that generate a complete wellness baseline for consumers. DexaFit locations help consumers replace guesswork with science and track their health, fitness, and body measurement changes overtime. The Fit3D ProScanner is an integral piece to the stack of DexaFit technologies.
Non-invasive glucose tracking is the holy grail for diabetics. Everyone who is anyone in the world of wearables is working on ways to crack it, but it’s incredibly difficult to do.
Cardiogram, a heart rate tech company, believes it may have found the answer in the heart rate sensor that you’re possibly wearing right now. As part of a new study with researchers at UC San Francisco, Cardiogram found that its DeepHeart neural network can identify signs of diabetes with a simple heart rate sensor from devices ranging from Garmin watches to the first Apple Watch.
How does it work? Essentially, it’s going off an idea that was established in a 2005 study that showed a correlation between heart rate variability and diabetes. It works like this: As your body developers insulin resistance, your sympathetic nervous system gets hyperactive and your parasympathetic nervous system withdraws. This causes an imbalance in your overall nervous system.
Medical Design and Outsourcing, Chris Newmarker from
… There are two main things that sensors can achieve in mobile health devices, according to Smith. Sensors can measure an array of vital signs including blood pressure, temperature, pulse oximetry and more. And just as important, they monitor the machine itself to make sure it is working properly.
“Say someone in the home knocks it down. When they pick it up, is it still working properly? … If there’s something wrong with the machine, it will report back on its own,” Smith said.
Here are four ways TE Connectivity (Schaffhausen, Switzerland) has sought to ensure that its sensors meet today’s mobile health challenges:
A device that’s turned off doesn’t suck battery life, but it also doesn’t work. Now a low-power system that’s always on the alert can turn devices on when they are needed, saving energy in the networked internet of things.
… most research has found that specialty running shoes—from minimalist to maximalist to extreme motion control—don’t reduce injury risk at all.
“The price tag on running shoes does not and will not influence risks of developing running injuries. There are many more important factors that influence running injuries, but footwear cost is certainly not one of them,” says Max R. Paquette, an assistant professor and exercise, sports and movement sciences director for the Sport Performance and Health Consulting Center at the University of Memphis.
They have developed a small metallic tab, called a triboelectric nanogenerator which, when attached to the body, can generate electricity from simple movements – including bending a finger.
The tab is only 1.5cm long and 1cm wide, and can deliver a maximum voltage of 124 volts, a current of 10 microamps and a power density of 0.22 millwatts per square centimetre.
This is certainly not enough to rapidly charge a smartphone, but these are the early days of the invention’s development, and it was able to power 48 LED lights simultaneously.
The collaborative research project was led by teams at the University at Buffalo in the US and the Institute of Semiconductors (IoP) at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS).
University of Washington engineers have turned tissue paper – similar to toilet tissue – into a new kind of wearable sensor that can detect a pulse, a blink of an eye and other human movement. The sensor is light, flexible and inexpensive, with potential applications in health care, entertainment and robotics.
The technology, described in a paper published in January in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, shows that by tearing tissue paper that’s loaded with nanocomposites and breaking the paper’s fibers, the paper acts as a sensor. It can detect a heartbeat, finger force, finger movement, eyeball movement and more, said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering and senior author of the research.
“The major innovation is a disposable wearable sensor made with cheap tissue paper,” said Chung. “When we break the specimen, it will work as a sensor.”
How can someone just as short/tall/skinny/fat as me run so much faster?
Plenty of reasons why your doppelganger leaves you in the dust. Speedwork may be his religion, and you haven’t converted yet. This may be her 50th 10K, when you’re just stepping up to the distance. He may have a new girlfriend standing on the sidelines; she may have a postpregnancy goal she’s gunning for.
“Just because two people are long and lean or have a powerful build doesn’t mean they match up in terms of VO2 max, mental toughness, or injury history,” says Kristen Dieffenbach, Ph.D., associate professor of athletic coaching education at West Virginia University.
The Conversation, Vivian Ng and Catherine Kent from
A recent study found that seven in ten smartphone apps share data with third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics. Data from numerous apps can be linked within a smartphone to build this more detailed picture of us, even if permissions for individual apps are granted separately. Effectively, smartphones can be converted into surveillance devices.
The result is the creation and amalgamation of digital footprints that provide in-depth knowledge about your life. The most obvious reason for companies collecting information about individuals is for profit, to deliver targeted advertising and personalised services. Some targeted ads, while perhaps creepy, aren’t necessarily a problem, such as an ad for the new trainers you have been eyeing up.
It was a real pleasure to see my marathon time predictor featured in the Guardian a few months back. My algorithm uses data from more than a thousand runners of varying abilities who have logged their training here on Fetcheveryone, to come up with a better prediction of marathon time. You can try it here.
It’s based on my view that the usefulness of the popular formula devised by Peter Riegel in 1977 starts to break down at marathon distance. This may well be because runners are often under-prepared for the rigours of the marathon, but it’s arguably better for morale to smash a realistic goal than to burn out chasing an elusive one.