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As the market has grown, established providers of dedicated wearable fitness trackers, such as Fitbit and Garmin, have targeted corporate clients. Research suggests more active employees are, on average, healthier and thus more productive: employees of all ages can reduce work impairment by 3.2 days a year if they go from no exercise to 150 minutes per week, according to a study by Rand Europe for Britain’s Healthiest Workplace.
“Wearables are especially attractive to companies that run their own insurance schemes,” says Aditya Kaul, research director at Tractica, which has studied the rise of wearable devices. “Even as the market grows beyond fitness trackers towards smartwatches like the Apple Watch, the main focus is on health and wellness, with employees receiving wearables as a part of their benefits scheme — similar to getting a discounted gym membership or corporate health check-ups.”
The workouts should have been uneventful. But when two-time Olympian Desiree Linden ran repeats on a rural road in Charlevoix, Mich., they went slower than she expected. Linden returned to her home base in Rochester, Mich., huddled with coach Kevin Hanson, and trained with her teammates on familiar courses. To her surprise, she crushed workouts there.
Turns out, one of the most commonly used pieces of running technology, a GPS watch, had given Linden an inaccurate read on her fitness. In Charlevoix, she measured distances with her watch, but the satellite connection there was unreliable. She was catching a bad signal, though she didn’t know it at the time.
Every runner with a GPS watch can relate to what Linden went through a couple of years ago, the sense that you’re fitter than what your watch indicates, the quirks in technology messing with your mind on training runs, and even in races. And every runner can relate to the extra motivation and confidence that comes when the mile splits on your GPS watch are faster than you feel or you beat someone on a Strava segment.
… he great thing with the 645 is that the small format design has NOT compromised on the screen size. Garmin have just made the bezel and wasted screen space smaller. Thus the 645 has an effective screen size of 1.2″ (30.4 mm) diameter or 240x240px which is the SAME as the Forerunner 935 and BETTER than the likes of the earlier 745XT/235/630 models.
Aesthetic Differences – Practical Differences
The 645 follows a recent trend with Garmin watches. They are moving away from a ‘sports-only’ look and towards a 24×7 watch that many people could wear for work. Partly this is a practical thing in that YOU might want to only wear one device to track your sleep, steps and sports. But from Garmin’s point of view THEY don’t want you with another brand on your wrist reminding you of something else at different times of the day.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Air Force Research Laboratory from
It’s a sweaty project, but the sweat is worth the effort for scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory working to better understand the links between materials, technology and warfighter performance.
Born out of an AFRL and industry collaboration within the Nano-Bio Manufacturing Consortium, a wearable patch is helping researchers make ‘sense’ of the link between sweat and hydration.
“Hydration is one way we can understand a person’s susceptibility to heat stress,” said Jeremy Ward, a materials scientist on the Advanced Development Team at the AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate and government lead for the NBMC. “One approach to learning about a person’s hydration status is by monitoring the composition of their sweat.”
Perhaps now, getting “your steps in” will provide useful biological data, as scientists from the longevity biotech company GERO and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) have shown that physical activity data acquired from wearables can be used to produce digital biomarkers of aging and frailty. Findings from the new study—published recently in Scientific Reports in an article entitled “Extracting Biological Age from Biomedical Data via Deep Learning: Too Much of a Good Thing?”—demonstrate the emerging potential of combining wearable sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for continuous health risk monitoring with real-time feedback to life and health insurance, healthcare, and wellness providers.
“AI is a powerful tool in pattern recognition and has demonstrated outstanding performance in visual object identification, speech recognition, and other fields,” explained senior study investigator Peter Fedichev, Ph.D., GERO science director and head of the laboratory of biological systems simulation at MIPT. “Recent promising examples in the field of medicine include neural networks showing cardiologist-level performance in detection of an arrhythmia in ECG data, deriving biomarkers of age from clinical blood biochemistry, and predicting mortality based on electronic medical records. Inspired by these examples, we explored AI potential for health risks assessment based on human physical activity.”
Garmin has launched Connect IQ 3.0 along with a host of new apps. Announced at its second Developer Summit, the update enables even more functionality across its line of smart-watches and bike computers,
The Connect IQ platform launched some three years ago. Since then, more than 54 million apps were downloaded to more than eight million compatible devices. With a bit of coding knowledge, anyone can use the open platform to create watch faces, customised data fields, widgets and apps.
Connect IQ 3.0 opens up Garmin’s audio player platform, enabling developers to integrate music, podcast, audio books and more into compatible Garmin devices. This was to be expected as the company has recently launched the Forerunner 645 Music, its first sports-watch with offline storage of tunes. The update also makes it easier to take advantage of notification features and allows developers to integrate maps into their apps.
UC-Berkeley statistician Michael Jordan has a Medium post and a video that make the same case: there is no such thing as an artificial intelligence revolution yet. Jordan argues that the press (and sometimes accommodating academics who don’t want to go into a methodological exegesis) use the term artificial intelligence when they are mostly talking about machine learning. He argues that what we have on our hands is a new field of engineering, albeit one that demands collaboration with social scientists, natural scientists, and humanities scholars. The piece also scopes the terrain for Intelligent Augmentation (IA) and Intelligent Infrastructure (II). Definitely worth a read/view because it does a nice job of setting the boundaries and marking the field. Hat tip to David Nicholson.
If you’re doing time series forecasting, maybe don’t drop your statistical models for machine learning approaches just yet. Spyros Makridakis, Evangelos Spiliotis, and Vassilios Assimakopoulos used 1045 monthly time series to test 8 statistical models and several popular ML models. The stats models “dominated” in terms of accuracy and computational resources used.
And if you do natural language inference (NLI), my colleague Sam Bowman finds claims of NLI model accuracy to be overblown. Instead of picking up signals from the words themselves, the models may be overfitting to length of sentence, inflating their reported performance.
Bowman and his colleague from DeepMind and UW-Seattle are not resting on their findings for one minute. Instead, they’ve kicked off a contest to develop GLUE – General Language Understanding Evaluation – a benchmarking tool that can ensure performance of models across a diverse range of Natural Language Understanding tasks. They’ve got an explainer paper here (pdf) and the leaderboard + FAQs are here.
At Boston University all engineering students will be required to take data science coursework starting this fall. Haven’t seen this before, but expect more to come. It will put a strain on faculty qualified to teach data science, especially as the most talented leave academia for industry (see “pie-eating contest” in Extra Extra). Down the street at Boston College the student newspaper advocates for creating a new engineering school to augment current natural and applied science programs.
In this week’s episode of The Passions and the p-values two Minnesotan scholars have produced a report “The irreproducibility crisis of modern science” that garnered Congressional attention. The report summarizes the many conversations about reproducibility, the professionalization of science, and the scalar boost of data science within science. Still lovely to see it so well articulated in one place.
Simon DeDeo, computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and external faculty at Santa Fe Institute, analyzed 40,000 speeches from the time period leading up to and during the French Revolution and found that: “rhetorical innovations may have played a significant role in winning acceptance for the new principles of governance.” Liberté, égalité, fraternité! What could this finding possibly mean about the way American politics is now playing out on character-limited (and character limiting?) Twitter?
In unrelated Carnegie Mellon news, the school has a new robotics partnership with Sony focusing on food prep, cooking, and delivery. What was that? Was it…the scent of fear as human jobs disappear? Or was it perhaps the scent of a much more delicious dinner that a human made with a robotic prep cook. I could totally appreciate having a prep cook around.
Purdue University has launched the Integrated Data Science Initiative. It’s a “data science for all ecosystem” that will bring data science into teaching across disciplines as well as kick-start research collaborations among faculty and with industry.
Purdue University also announced a new “Design for Security” program that will award badges in conjunction with Intel to students who have completed a number of classes that will teach them an integrated human-machine approach to security. Many weak points in cybersecurity are at the people level, not the machine level (e.g. do not click on links from people you don’t know; no Nigerian princes want to share their riches with you).
Lehigh University in Pennsylvania announced three new interdisciplinary institutes, one of which was… you guessed it … an Institute for Data.
University of Alabama at Birminghamstarted a masters degree in data science which will primarily sit in their computer science department with some coursework offered at the Collat School of Business.
Harvard launched a new Quantitative Biology Initiative to “bring together faculty working on biological problems with statisticians, mathematicians, and engineers who elicit patterns from the enormous data sets that are now available.” Note that this is NOT called a data science institute. I fully expect to see many more of these smaller, more targeted interdisciplinary initiatives spring up. It’s interdisciplinary data science 2.0: the adjacent discipline approach.
The University of Georgia is combining its catalog of over 35,000 crop and plant species with a new real-time FARMWAVE app that is akin to a smart-home setup for farmers. Sensors all over the farm provide insight into humidity, crop health, and will now be linked to meta-tagged images in the crop and plant database to help diagnose disease and pestilence.
Not to be outdone, Washington University in St. Louis is promoting SimSoy, a computational model to recommend “the five best seed types to grow given the average yields, weather conditions, and soil composition.”
The University of Michigan will be the host university for a 12-school, 5-year $5m National Institute of Healthgrant to study child gun deaths. It has historically been difficult to study gun deaths, so this is a big deal. It’s a fairly small grant if it’s meant to span 12 schools over five years.
Today’s multi-pronged release of cycling gear by Garmin is probably the company’s most decisive yet at fending off competitors to its lucrative head unit business. And in some ways, they’re probably even undercutting their own high-end head units to stave off competitors. For starts, we’ve got the new Edge 520 Plus. That takes the previous $249 Edge 520 and adds full-blown mapping to it (including turn by turn navigation), along with a handful of other features like rider to rider messaging. The cost? A mere $30 price increase to $279USD.
Then they’ve got the Edge 130 – which is sorta like an Edge 520-lite, carrying a huge number of features into a relatively tiny lightweight device. That unit appears targeted at the Lezyne product line as well as long rumored Wahoo MINI+GPS units. In many ways, I think I’m actually far more impressed by the Edge 130 than the Edge 520 Plus. But you can read all about the Edge 130 in my full in-depth review.
And lastly, there was the new RTL510 bike-light radar combo-dish. That’s cool too, though not really game-changing. And they don’t face any radar-specific competitors either. Still, nifty stuff.
This post, however, is about the Edge 520 Plus, so let’s dive right into things.
Silicon Valley Business Journal, Jennifer Elias from
Struggling action-camera maker GoPro Inc.’s stock jumped more than 7 percent on Thursday on speculation that Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi is considering buying it.
San Mateo-based GoPro could seek as much as $1 billion in a sale to Xiaomi, The Information reports, comparing that to the price Hewlett Packard paid for Palm in 2010.
The reported potential takeover comes as GoPro has issued series of layoffs in recent years due to faltering revenue amid greater competition from other hardware makers.
GoPro CEO Nick Woodman has said he would be open to a potential buyout, an idea that has seemed to please investors. In February, he said the company had hired investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co. to facilitate a potential sale. Woodman has more than 75 percent of voting power.
Google’s AIY Projects (a clever play on “DIY” and “AI” that makes no sense when you actually think about it) pair a Raspberry Pi with the accessories, software, and requisite cardboard to make your own Google Assistant smart speaker or object-recognizing smart camera. They only launched last year, but Google is already back with new and improved versions of both the AIY Vision Kit and AIY Voice Kit (as spotted by 9to5 Google).
The new kits now include a fresh Raspberry Pi Zero in the box and a preloaded SD card to make it easier to get started. Google is also now providing an AIY companion app for Android (and soon iOS and Chrome) to help with wireless setup and configuration of your new DIY smart speaker or camera — though you can still use the Pi as a standard Linux computer with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse if that’s more your style. The Vision Kit also includes the Pi Camera Module V2.
A runner once told me he was going to rely on adrenaline to get him over the finish line of his first marathon. But that’s a very bad idea!
First, adrenaline is not adequate fuel for an endurance event (it’s for short bursts of high intensity energy, typically in a “fight or flight” situation).
Ask most coaches, and hydration doesn’t need a sensor. Thirst and urine color are perfectly good indicators—the darker urine, the more dehydration. Experts in the field note that these indicators are 100% analog, pervasive, intuitive, and reasonably accurate. Still many look to digital hydration sensors to dramatically impact sport.
How close are we to seeing hydration tech on the market?
Currently, hydration tech is mostly comprised of an immature group of technologies and user interfaces. Advancing these technologies and interfaces involves trial and error. The good news is that hardware and software platforms for building hydration-sensing systems are becoming more hackable. This means undergraduate and graduate engineers (and entrepreneurs) can prototype new devices easily and gear them to targeted user groups. Hackathon events, especially at top engineering schools, provide incentives and a setting for ideas to gestate and for the work to emerge.
Charlie Exton, a defence specialist at Porcher Industries, plans to run this weekend’s London Marathon in a T-shirt and socks made from his company’s newly developed next generation lightweight blast resistant fabric.
In response to the long-term demand and requests of soldier’s agencies including the UK MoD DSTL and the USA DoD PEO, the new para-aramid based fabric by Porcher Industries’ Aerospace and Defense Business Unit has been developed to provide soldiers with an extra level of protection against improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in garments worn next to the skin.
Human stem cells have shown potential in medicine as they can transform into various specialized cell types such as bone and cartilage cells. The current approach to obtain such specialized cells is to subject stem cells to specialized instructive protein molecules known as growth factors. However, use of growth factors in the human body can generate harmful effects including unwanted tissue growth, such as a tumor.
Researchers at Texas A&M University have explored a new class of clay nanoparticles that can direct stem cells to become bone or cartilage cells.
Dr. Akhilesh Gaharwar, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and his students have demonstrated that a specific type of two-dimensional (2-D) nanoparticles, also known as nanosilicates, can grow bone and cartilage tissue from stem cells in the absence of growth factors. These nanoparticles are similar to flaxseed in shape, but 10 million times smaller in size.
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Air Force Research Laboratory from
Survival — it’s the first thing an ejected pilot contemplates once safely on the ground.
A survival situation could span days and the Air Force is taking advantage of advancements in technology to allow ejected pilots to survive for longer periods of time.
Researchers from the Junior Force Warfighters Operations in the Air Force Research Laboratory Materials and Manufacturing Directorate are increasing a pilot’s capability to survive, escape and evade through near-term, short-turnaround projects.
“We are developing materials that will last longer in operational environments so that isolated personnel have the equipment readily available,” said Capt. Jason Goins, JFWORX team member.
A backpacking trip in the Rothrock State Forest and day hikes in the Laurel Highlands and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia were among the Penn State Outing Club’s 2018 spring-term events.
After this weekend, though, the 98-year-old organization has nothing on its calendar, and unless things change, it won’t.
The Outing Club isn’t allowed to go outside anymore.
According to an announcement posted by the club on its website last week, the university will not allow the club to organize and run outdoor, student-led trips starting next semester.
… Often going hand in hand with efforts to quantify the body and behaviors through all manners of technology, this hacking ethos relies on the idea that if people can just collect more data to better understand themselves, perhaps they can engineer themselves to perfection. We can hack our technologies, and even our societies, so why not ourselves?
Alas, things are not so straightforward. While there are many similarities between the biological and the computational, biological systems are complex on an entirely different level. They have evolved over millions of years, with a great deal of feedback and a mind-bogglingly large number of interacting components. And, in many ways, they’re already well-tuned and optimized.
Biology is a game of trade-offs. Any change in an interconnected system can yield both positives and negatives. Ways around sleep, for instance, come with costs. Taken to their extreme, practices like polyphasic sleep can take a month of adapting before you stop feeling like a zombie, and can severely mess with your social life.
… Women and men are different (Pulitzer, please!). But endurance science hasn’t always kept that critical fact in mind. “It’s the prevailing problem in all biomedical research, sport science not excluded,” says Stacy Sims, who has a doctorate in environmental exercise physiology, and sports nutrition. Sims is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who has been leading the charge for more research on women for 20 years. All too often, researchers test a hypothesis on a group of men, then extrapolate the results out as pertinent to all, regardless of sex. The result is that a lot of what we know about training and adaptation should be amended with an asterisk and the caveat: *for men.
How big of an issue is this? In 2014, a review published in looked at 1,382 peer-reviewed studies from sports science and sports medicine journals. It found that, on average, women made up just 39 percent of study subjects. In 2016, Bethany Brookshire, a writer for Science News, built on the 2014 review by tallying the number of studies that included women in two major academic journals: Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise and the American Journal of Sports Medicine. She found that 42 percent of the study subjects were women, which seems like an improvement. But she also found that, while 27 percent of studies were done only with men, just four percent of the research was female-specific.
To get an understanding of why women have traditionally been left out, some historical context helps.
I was rushing to a 10 a.m. meeting with the director of the organization where I had just started working. In an attempt to look less disheveled than usual, I was wearing a long, red skirt. And I was cycling rapidly to get there in time.
Object Lessons
Cycling became gradually harder the closer I got to work. Eventually, I couldn’t ignore the resistance to my pedaling, and I saw the culprit: The bottom of my skirt had gotten entangled in the bike spokes. I tried to extricate it gently. When this didn’t work, I started yanking. The skirt tore off unevenly, the ends marked by unsightly patches of bike grease. I looked like I’d gotten into a fight with an urban fox, and lost.
Dressing for a commute should be straightforward. Yet this becomes more complicated when the commute involves a bicycle, and when the clothing is intended for a woman.
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
Monitoring of recovery in the context of athletic performance has gained significant importance during recent years. As a systematic process of data collection and evaluation, the monitoring of recovery can be implemented for various purposes. It may aid to prevent negative outcomes of training or competition, such as underrecovery, overtraining, or injuries. Further, it aims at establishing routines and strategies necessary to guarantee athletes’ readiness for performance by restoring their depleted resources. Comprehensive monitoring of recovery ideally encompasses a multidimensional approach, thereby considering biological, psychological, and social monitoring methods. From a biological perspective, physiological (e.g., cardiac parameters), biochemical (e.g., creatine kinase), hormonal (e.g., salivary cortisol) and immunological (e.g., immunoglobulin A) markers can be taken into account to operationalize training loads and recovery needs. Psychological approaches suggest the application of validated and reliable psychometric questionnaires (e.g., Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes) to measure a subjective perception of recovery as well as the subjective degree of training- or competition-induced fatigue. Social aspects also play a role in performance monitoring and may hence provide essential performance-related information. The implementation of a monitoring routine within athletic environments represents a continuous process which functions as an effective addition to training and depends on a range of conditions (e.g., organizational regulations, commitment of athletes). Current research in the field of monitoring aims at establishing individualized monitoring regimes that are referring to intraindividual reference values with the help of innovative technological devices.
Data breaches are now literally more than a daily occurrence—2,216 happened in the past year alone, according to Verizon’s annual Data Breach Investigations Report, released on April 10.
Health-related organizations accounted for a quarter of those incidents. Three weeks ago, that group claimed a troubling new member: Under Armour’s MyFitnessPal, which announced a data breach had exposed information (usernames, email addresses, and passwords) of up to 150 million users.
This is the first known data breach of a major consumer fitness app. (In 2016, Fitbit suffered a small breach, but the issue involved just a few dozen accounts where hackers stole user passwords independently, and used the accounts to seek fraudulent refunds.) But it likely won’t be the last. And what’s at stake is data far more intimate than passwords and usernames. Fitness trackers know our heart rates and step counts. They know we didn’t sleep well last night, maybe because they also know we ate barbecue and had a couple beers. And they track detailed patterns on when and where we like to work out, with whom, and where we live.
It is widely believed that an active cool-down is more effective for promoting post-exercise recovery than a passive cool-down involving no activity. However, research on this topic has never been synthesized and it therefore remains largely unknown whether this belief is correct. This review compares the effects of various types of active cool-downs with passive cool-downs on sports performance, injuries, long-term adaptive responses, and psychophysiological markers of post-exercise recovery. An active cool-down is largely ineffective with respect to enhancing same-day and next-day(s) sports performance, but some beneficial effects on next-day(s) performance have been reported. Active cool-downs do not appear to prevent injuries, and preliminary evidence suggests that performing an active cool-down on a regular basis does not attenuate the long-term adaptive response. Active cool-downs accelerate recovery of lactate in blood, but not necessarily in muscle tissue. Performing active cool-downs may partially prevent immune system depression and promote faster recovery of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems. However, it is unknown whether this reduces the likelihood of post-exercise illnesses, syncope, and cardiovascular complications. Most evidence indicates that active cool-downs do not significantly reduce muscle soreness, or improve the recovery of indirect markers of muscle damage, neuromuscular contractile properties, musculotendinous stiffness, range of motion, systemic hormonal concentrations, or measures of psychological recovery. It can also interfere with muscle glycogen resynthesis. In summary, based on the empirical evidence currently available, active cool-downs are largely ineffective for improving most psychophysiological markers of post-exercise recovery, but may nevertheless offer some benefits compared with a passive cool-down. [full text]