Apple’s new Close Your Rings website is a good message and an excellent way to sell the Apple Watch. While I’m not particularly excited about any app using game theory to push my buttons, for the Health app I’m willing to make an exception. I’m more aware of my activity since I started wearing the Apple Watch than I’d ever been before. It’s because of those rings that I bike most places, often wake up an hour early to go on a hike, and even occasionally find myself marching up and down the stairs in my house in the evening just to make sure I get those extra 10 minutes of elevated heart rate. Don’t believe me? Look below.
Not only does this help my physical health, it also helps Apple’s fiscal health. Several times I’ve told friends about how I use the Apple Watch to track fitness, and it often ends with them nodding approvingly while saying something like, “Hmmm”. Then the next time I see them following a birthday or big holiday, they are wearing their very own Apple Watch.
… The smartwatch features adaptive training plans and real-time guidance to serve as a coach throughout your workouts. The key to the Suunto 3 is its ability to automatically create seven-day training plans using your fitness level and overall exercise history to inform your regimen. And because the Suunto recognizes that life sometimes get in the way of the gym, the watch will automatically adapt your plan if you miss an exercise (or, conversely, end up working a little harder than you need to one day).
… It’s gym class, quantified. Green means moderate activity, between 70 percent and 80 percent of students’ maximum heart rates. Meet the target, earn full participation marks for the day.
Burcham said the wristbands, used by his classes for about two years now, have been transformational. Students work harder and are more engaged because they can see the results of their activity — or lack of activity — in real time projected on the gym walls.
“Their heart rate is not going to lie to us,” Burcham said. “It holds everybody accountable.”
… Motiv’s fitness tracking concept is more laid back than stat-heavy. The app counts active minutes — taking more than 100 steps every minute, for 10 minutes or more — as the metric. It won’t even do nonstop syncing, but you can trigger a sync by twisting the ring clockwise on your finger. But if I walk less than 10 continuous minutes, I get credit for nothing.
It’s a clever idea that battles the thing I tend to experience on Fitbit, Apple Watch and others, which is just rewarding myself for a bunch of daily steps. Motiv counts overall total steps, too, but discounts the importance.
… There are over 36 million active runners in the US and over 60% get some sort of injury each year. The advantage of purchasing trackers that are located on your feet are that these devices improve not just how far and how fast you run, but also how well you run. They do this through parameters related to your running form such as foot landing, cadence and time on the ground – metrics which you cannot get from wrist based trackers.
While this market is still in its infancy, there are a few players that have already come out with intelligent trackers for your feet.
… “For wearables, it is about continuously accessing a tiny yet high-quality sample of biofluid (interstitial fluid, sweat, tears, saliva, etc.),” Heikenfeld, told HCB News. “This is a challenge in itself that can be plagued by contamination and other issues.”
He added that wearables collect biofluid in the form of microliters or nanoliters. Because of that, reliable sensors are needed that can continuously work with small sample volumes and not be degraded by the other chemicals in the biofluid.
The Novel Devices Lab team is working on devices the size of a Band-Aid that generate sweat on a tiny patch of skin and wick it away, to sensors that measure substances like glucose. The subject can remain in a resting state while that is happening.
“For sweat, it’s simple in theory but tough in practice. You need to get the sample immediately off the skin surface and quickly transport it to a sensor before the sample itself degrades,” said Heikenfeld. “In some cases, you need a sensor surface that can recognize the chemical analytes of interest over the huge number of other chemical analytes that are present.”
Going for the gold is what the Olympics is all about and three UBC entrepreneurs are working to help athletes get closer to the podium.
Kevin Reilly and Behnam Molavi—both PhD engineering graduates from UBC—and sports physician Babak Shadgan have designed a smart garment capable of monitoring vital performance metrics through sensors and software embedded in the fabric. The technology uses near-infrared spectroscopy to measure the local metabolism of an athlete’s muscles.
“With our technology, coaches know how fast their athletes are burning energy and how much fuel they have left in their tank—giving coaches a competitive edge by allowing them to change their strategy in real time,” said Reilly.
Level began in 2015 as the Project Genesis prototype within our innovation lab, The Shop. A partnership and academic study with the renowned USC Center for Body Computing soon followed in 2016. And results of that groundbreaking work were published last September in the NEJM Catalyst. [video, 1:14]
Many health tracking devices have focused on measuring activity or sleep, but creating a true picture of daily health factors demands capturing more inputs.
Heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular (CV) diseases continue to be among the top public health issues. Assessing this risk is critical first step toward reducing the likelihood that a patient suffers a CV event in the future. To do this assessment, doctors take into account a variety of risk factors — some genetic (like age and sex), some with lifestyle components (like smoking and blood pressure). While most of these factors can be obtained by simply asking the patient, others factors, like cholesterol, require a blood draw. Doctors also take into account whether or not a patient has another disease, such as diabetes, which is associated with significantly increased risk of CV events.
Nature Biomedical Engineering, we show that in addition to detecting eye disease, images of the eye can very accurately predict other indicators of CV health. This discovery is particularly exciting because it suggests we might discover even more ways to diagnose health issues from retinal images.
Using deep learning algorithms trained on data from 284,335 patients, we were able to predict CV risk factors from retinal images with surprisingly high accuracy for patients from two independent datasets of 12,026 and 999 patients.
I enjoy cycling quite a bit because of the fresh air, the speed, the physical exertion, and the magnificent views. I have been cycling throughout the San Francisco bay area for about 2 years now, increasing in my ability and frequency of riding. I commuted by bike twice or thrice per week while attending the Metis bootcamp throughout three months. From this I have learned that cycling is fun but also dangerous. There are plenty of routes that require cyclists to “share the road” with cars and as we know, some are better at sharing than others. Also cars have a significant physical advantage in this jockeying for space. When a car unexpectedly passes a cyclist it can be quite alarming and feel very unsafe. Also terrible things can sometimes happen, like this. So my idea was formed to create a tool that alerts a rider when a car is approaching from behind. For those that don’t know, “Car Back!” is what one cyclist will shout to another to alert them of an approaching car from behind – so I took this name for my project.
It’s game on in the AI-on-a-chip race. Alongside Nvidia’s successes turning Graphics Processing Units into massively performant compute devices (culminating in last year’s release of the ‘Volta’ V100 GPU), we have ARM releasing its ‘Project Trillium’ machine learning processor on Valentine’s Day and Intel making noises around bringing the fruits of its Nervana acquisition to market, currently at sample stage. Microsoft with Catapult, Google with its TPU — if you haven’t got some silicon AI going on at the moment, you are missing out. So, what’s going on?
We have certainly come a long way since John von Neumann first introduced the register-based computer processing architecture. That, simple design (here’s a nice picture from Princeton), which fires data and instructions into an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), still sits at the heart of what we call CPU cores today, though with their pre-fetching and other layers of smartness, these are to von Neumann’s original design a souped-up, drag racing version of the original design.
Northwestern University professor John A. Rogers is collaborating with a broad collection of partners including Gatorade, the Seattle Mariners, the U.S. Air Force and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to bring his wearable microfluidic sweat analytics system into widespread distribution.
The device measures sweat and sweat biomarkers accurately and in real time, allowing athletes, military personnel, fitness pros and others to monitor sweat rate and electrolyte loss, so they can keep hydrated, replenish their electrolytes and stay on top of their game.
The partnerships are aimed at further developing, testing and validating Rogers’ device, which monitors sweat loss and analyzes sweat chemistry with a simple, real-time visual readout.
Previously developed in Rogers’ Northwestern Engineering laboratory, the soft, flexible device sits on the skin and measures sweat to determine how the body responds to exercise. Launched from Rogers’ group through Northwestern’s Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), startup Epicore Biosystems has established large volume manufacturing capabilities for these microfluidic devices. It also has plans to co-package them with nutritional, skin health, cosmetics and sports hydration products, with additional possibilities for use in clinical medicine and rehabilitation.
Just shy of a year ago GoPro announced initial details around their consumer-oriented 360° action camera, Fusion. But it wouldn’t be until this past November that the company started shipping the $699 dual-lens unit. Since then I’ve been using the camera in a surprising variety of ways. More than I’d thought I would, and for more than just 360° content. In fact, one of GoPro’s biggest pushes with the Fusion camera has been what they call ‘OverCapture’, which basically means you can create a non-360° clip from it, using any angle you want.
Of course, that concept certainly isn’t something GoPro invented, it’s been around a while. But what GoPro has done is bring popularity to it, and with the impressive quality levels on Fusion, it makes it possible to use said camera instead of a flotilla of regular GoPro action cams.
Time and again, runners are warned about the perils of cheap running shoes – the oft-repeated justification for a pricey pair of footwear is that that running shoes are an investment – and don’t we want to invest in the very best?
But when the average price of a pair of running shoes in a specialty running store in $114, that investment can sometimes sting. Do you really get what you pay for? Yes and no, says RunRepeat founder and statistician Jens Jakob Andersen.
Though all-purpose athletic shoes are often sold at lower price points than shoes designed specifically for running, they’re also not designed to withstand the rigors of running; treads wear down faster, and uppers disintegrate earlier. That alone makes a compelling case for investing in a dedicated running shoe, which usually costs more than their all-purpose counterparts.
“While any shoe can be used for any activity, it’s important to note that running shoes are crafted to function more resiliently than regular sporty kicks,” says Andersen. “The reason why specialty running shoes get more appreciation than regular footwear is that they have the features, the materials, and the construction to go with their price tags.”
ATOM Lab, the research and innovation business unit of shoe machinery manufacturer ATOM, will present a fully-automated process for shoe production for the first time at the Simac Tanning Tech trade fair in Milan from February 20–22, 2018. At its booth in Hall 14, visitors can select 3D-printed soles and uppers, and have customized shoes made for them.
The most technically challenging step in this process is bonding the outsole to the shoe upper. Covestro developed an efficient solution for this within a very short time. It is based on polyurethane raw materials for adhesives, which are applied to the outsole or upper by means of digital printing.
… [Stephan] Drake began poking around and ultimately discovered the answer right in his own backyard. He came across Jeff Bates, a professor at the University of Utah who had done work on the creation of high-end plastics. Drake figured that, since ski bases are made of plastic, Bates could help. “I met with him and said, ‘We’re looking for a permanent coating that will rival an all-temperature ski wax, an alternative to wax,’” says Drake.
“I think I can make this work,” Bates said.
After 13 months and 40 prototypes, Bates discovered a formula that did, in fact, work. A rub-on liquid polymer that permanently bonded to the base of any ski, which Drake named Phantom. “Even if you stone grind your skis, it doesn’t come off because it penetrates into the pores of the base material,” says Drake.
Back in 2013, Adriana Santanocito, a fashion student in Milan, and her friend and colleague Enrica Arena looked into whether anything useful could be done with the vast amounts of orange peel left behind by juicing machines.
“When you squeeze the orange at an industrial level, half of it is waste that has to be disposed of,” says Arena. “Some companies were sued because they weren’t disposing of the orange waste in the right way and were just dumping it in the fields – and Italy has 700,000 tonnes of orange waste a year.”
Working with the polytechnic university of Milan, the pair developed and patented a process that attracted €500,000 in funding from private investors, the EU and the H&M Foundation. They are now collaborating with Boniser, an orange producer, to turn the peel into a silk-like fabric, Orange Fiber.
The thrill of running can distract us from the reality of what is happening to the body with every stride. Your heart beats harder, pumping blood throughout the body. Sweat drips down your forehead as your body temperature rises. You feel the wind on your face as you turn round the track, up the trail, or down the road. These are the images that running conjures up in our heads and they are real, but while your heart and lungs are driving your engine toward redline, your chassis is under a lot of stress. Like it or not, your body must deal with 2.5 to 3 times its body weight with every single stride.
Think about this for a minute. If you stand up on both legs, you have half your body weight on each leg. And if you stand on one leg, that’s 100 percent of your body weight on one leg. Now take a barbell, add about 150 percent of your body weight to it, and hoist the load up and onto your shoulders; then stand on one leg.
… music has a unique role for snowboarders, many of whom not only listen to music to pump themselves up before the event, but also blast it during the actual competition to drown out the din around them.
They’re not here to gloat. The Norwegians, in fact, will go out of their way to tell you that there’s still a long way to go at these Olympics before they reach their goals and win the overall medal count. They’re also not here to tell anyone (like the struggling U.S. team; cough, cough) how to go about their business or impose their Norwegian societal values, which they believe are directly tied into the success of their winter sports development.
“We’re not a gorilla beating its chest,” said Tore Ovrebo, the Norwegian Olympic Committee’s director of elite sports. “We know it can change very quickly. We have to work hard.”
… The outdoor segment grew 16% in the quarter with significant contributions from wearable devices combined with growth of inReach® subscription services. Gross and operating margins improved to 63% and 36%, respectively, resulting in 26% operating income growth. We expect outdoor to continue to be a growth segment in 2018 as we leverage opportunities in wearables and other product categories in the segment.