Apple isn’t the only fitness watch company making its way into the gym. Garmin now is extending its reach into the personal training and fitness realm by partnering with Gold’s Gym, one of the top fitness franchises in the world. The first fruit of this collaboration is a new Garmin version of the popular Gold’s AMP app that bundles in support for the latest Garmin fitness wearables.
Released in 2017, the Gold’s AMP app is a combo fitness coaching and music app designed to free you from tedious and unmotivating workouts. The app uses upbeat music playlists to keep you moving and audio coaching that encourages you throughout your workout. The app has thousands of DJ mixes in a variety of music genres and more than 100 workouts for both indoor and outdoor activities. It’s like having the best music and a great trainer right by your side while you push yourself to run farther, bike faster or lift more no matter what level you are at. You don’t even have to be a Gold’s Gym member to use it, the app is available to everyone.
Consumers have proven fickle about wearables: Many a well-intentioned person has started out enthusiastic about a Fitbit, only to dump it in a drawer after a few months. But iBeat, the startup behind the iBeat Heart Watch, is betting that people will be more faithful to their wearable devices if their lives are on the line.
If you saw someone wearing this new smartwatch, which launched last week, you’d assume they were using it for the quaint purpose of telling time. Its true purpose would be apparent only if the watch’s sensors detected the telltale signs of cardiac arrest.
Then the dial hands on the watch face would be replaced by a stark question: “Are you okay?” Two big touch-screen buttons allow the user to either respond “yes,” in which case the watch goes back to being a watch and life goes on, or “no,” in which case the watch sends an alert to the user’s emergency contacts and also notifies the iBeat dispatch office, which can place a call to emergency responders.
… Future ultrafast devices also will require much smaller metal components, which calls for a higher resolution to make them at these nanoscale sizes.
“Forming metals with increasingly smaller shapes requires molds with higher and higher definition, until you reach the nanoscale size,” Martinez said. “Adding the latest advances in nanotechnology requires us to pattern metals in sizes that are even smaller than the grains they are made of. It’s like making a sand castle smaller than a grain of sand.”
This so-called “formability limit” hampers the ability to manufacture materials with nanoscale resolution at high speed.
Purdue researchers have addressed both of these issues – roughness and low resolution – with a new large-scale fabrication method that enables the forming of smooth metallic circuits at the nanoscale using conventional carbon dioxide lasers, which are already common for industrial cutting and engraving.
Wearables are the most personal devices we own, and we consistently grant them access to private health information, location data and more. Sometimes we sync up our Facebook with them, and other times we give them to our kids. So naturally, we have to take privacy and security with them seriously.
vpnMentor, a website dedicated to reliable and honest tips for VPNs, has commissioned a report from CI4S Limited, which provides cyber intelligence and related tech to companies, to dig into the security and privacy levels of three wearables: the Modius Headband, Digitsole Warm Insoles and Ivy Health Kids Thermometer.
However, the report only assessed the risks of the devices and companion apps when synced to an Android phone running 8.0 Oreo. The report found that Digitsole doesn’t implement authentication when pairing over Bluetooth, which it says means an attacker within range could hijack the Warm Insoles and send them commands to do things like change the temperature.
The New York Times, Kevin Quealy and Josh Katz from
If a running shoe made you 25 percent faster, would it be fair to wear it in a race? What about 10 percent? Or 2 percent? The Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4% — a bouncy, expensive shoe released to the public one year ago — raises these questions like no shoe in recent distance running history.
Nike says the shoes are about 4 percent better than some of its best racing shoes, as measured by how much energy runners spend when running in them. That is an astonishing claim, an efficiency improvement worth almost six minutes to a three-hour marathoner, or about eight minutes to a four-hour marathoner.
And it may be an accurate one, according to a new analysis by The New York Times of race data from about 500,000 marathon and half marathon running times since 2014.
Yes, we love our hiking boots. But for most outdoor adventures, trail running shoes are lighter, more affordable, and more versatile. Plus, they look great. I’ve been trail running for almost 20 years, ever since I huffed and puffed my way through my first high school cross-country practice. For the past year, I’ve logged miles over hill and dale to test all of the best trail runners out there. Since everyone’s feet and running practices are different, it’s hard to recommend one shoe that works for all—but among our favorites, there’s something for everyone.
… “We recorded the highest current density for a biogenic solar cell,” said Yadav. “These hybrid materials that we are developing can be manufactured economically and sustainably, and, with sufficient optimization, could perform at comparable efficiencies as conventional solar cells.”
The bacterial solar cells are still a long way from meeting that goal. But they have the advantage that they can work in dim light conditions, which makes them useful for producing solar power in places with overcast skies, and also for deep-sea exploration and mining. Plus, they do not require expensive materials or complex methods to make.
… Dr Kai Yang, a Principal Research Fellow in the Smart Electronic Materials and Systems (SEMS) research group, has been awarded a £600,000 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Fellowship to expand practical research that could help mitigate the pain generated by the common healthcare condition. … She says, “The Fellowship will allow me to build on my previous research into developing cutting-edge electronic textiles for wearable therapeutics, where dry electrodes printed on everyday clothing fabric can deliver a small electrical current to interfere with the pain signals and stimulate the release of the body’s natural endorphins easing the pain.
… there’s a crucial difference between technological and endurance sports domains, which is that endurance methods operate on the human body, which is not a piece of technology. Although (contrary to what many people believe) our species does continue to evolve, it is a very slow process compared to advancements smartphone features and robotic surgery techniques. For this reason, the optimal methods of maximizing endurance performance cannot just keep getting better. Once the best ways to train and fuel the human body for distance racing have been discovered, it is impossible to improve upon them further until and unless the human body changes enough for different methods to become optimal.
For example, in the 1950s, New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard discovered that a training system combining very large amounts of low-intensity work with small amounts of high-intensity work was more effective than any training system that had been tried previously.
“Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms.” That was the motto of the Chicago 1933 International Exposition. I used it as the epigraph of my 1993 book, Things That Make Us Smart, suggesting that it be flipped to read “People Propose, Technology Conforms.” I have helped develop design principles that make technology easier to use and understand, principles that evolved into my book Design of Everyday Things, and that today are called human-centered design.
But if these principles are so powerful and useful, why do they continually have to be taught and retaught? Why does each new industry repeat the failures of earlier industries? I now realize that my approach was wrong: We were addressing the symptoms, not the core, fundamental issues. The phrase “man conforms” is technology-centered, rather than people-centered. That much is obvious, but what was not so obvious was how much this view has permeated everything we do.
We have unwittingly accepted the paradigm that technology comes first, with people relegated to doing the actions that the machines cannot do. This requires people to act like machines, ever ready to take over when things go wrong.
The Tour de France is nearly inarguably the hardest endurance event on the planet. Exercise scientists have calculated the riders’ TRIMP value (“training impulse,” or training volume multiplied by training intensity; a metric like Strava’s suffer score) for the 21-day beat down at an astronomical 7,112. For reference, the TRIMP for running a marathon is about 300. During the race, some riders become increasingly catabolic, eating into their own muscle tissue faster than they can replace it. They also become pseudo-anemic as they rip through red blood cells, and their immunity plummets as their free radical damage rises.
So, yeah, nobody would call the Tour itself particularly “healthy.” But all those weeks when they’re not straddling the razor-thin wire between lighting it up and going down in flames? The pros seem to reap some lasting rewards even though some risks remain. Here’s how they stack up against typical folks who have to ride their office chairs more than their bicycles for three weeks in July.
With the Tour de France in full swing, major cycling brands are unveiling new super bikes as they continue to push the envelope in terms of weight and performance out on the road. Not to be outdone, Trek joined the fray by taking the wraps off of its new Madone SLR and SL models, which bring improved geometry, a smoother ride, and the option for either rim or disc brakes. But perhaps even more intriguing to cyclists is a new program that the company has launched that gives riders the option to customize every aspect of their bike, including selecting a completely unique paint job.
Thanks to software developed by Neural Concept, an EPFL spin-off, bicycle engineers can quickly calculate the most aerodynamic shape for a bike. The software – which is being presented in Stockholm today at the International Conference on Machine Learning – applies artificial intelligence to a set of user-defined specifications. Engineers have already used the program to design a bike that they hope will break the world speed record this fall in Nevada.
People make decisions based on the information that is most readily available to them. Understanding how the availability heuristic works will help you design for the way people think. [video, 2:22]
There are so many real-world physics problems involved in running. Lots of physicists have been inspired, for instance, by the crazy-fast speeds of Usain Bolt. Just take a look at this paper, “On the performance of Usain Bolt in the 100 m sprint” (European Journal of Physics), in which the authors examine the motion of Usain in one of his sprints.
But what if you want to look at more … unrealistic running? Or model running in situations you shouldn’t test in real life—like running at the pool? In order to explore these situations, you’ll need a physics model for running. Remember that science is all about building models, right?
“Using Keras to train a convolutional neural network to classify physical activity. The dataset was built from the recordings of 30 subjects performing basic activities and postural transitions while carrying a waist-mounted smartphone with embedded inertial sensors.”