… I’m consistently impressed with Garmin’s ability to streamline the designs of its high-end devices, particularly those like the Fenix devices that have a plethora of included sensors. All of these new Fenix 5 Plus models also have new music storage space, NFC tech for Garmin Pay, and onboard mapping, so this tiny wrist computer manages even more data than the previous Fenix devices. Even so, the Fenix 5S Plus I tested felt lighter on my wrist than the preceding model and blended in a bit better with both regular and workout clothes.
Other shared features among all of the Fenix 5 Plus models include water-resistance up to 10ATM, 16GB of memory, interchangeable 20mm bands, embedded GPS/GLONASS/Galileo sensors, an optical heart rate monitor, barometric altimeter, compass, accelerometer, gyroscope, and thermometer. The Fenix 5X Plus also includes a Pulse Ox sensor, and we’ll discuss that technology briefly in the coming sections.
The Fenix family is known for having some of the most advanced features in Garmin’s wearable lineup, and these watches also last longer on a single charge than most modern smartwatches. The Fenix 5S can last seven days or four hours in GPS/music mode; the Fenix 5 Plus lasts 10 days or 8 hours in GPS/music mode; and the Fenix 5X Plus lasts up to 20 days or 13 hours in GPS/music mode. Wearable battery lives have gotten better over the past few years, but competitors like the Apple Watch Series 3 and most WearOS devices still can’t match the Fenix 5S Plus. More appropriate comparisons come from other fitness-focused devices like Fitbit’s Ionic and Garmin’s own Vivoactive 3 Music.
Fitness trackers can be valuable tools for assessing the quality of life and daily functioning of cancer patients during treatment, a new study has found. The trackers, also known as wearable activity monitors, include commercial devices worn on the wrist that log a wearer’s step counts, stairs climbed, calories, heart rate and sleep.
“One of the challenges in treating patients with advanced cancer is obtaining ongoing, timely, objective data about their physical status during therapy,” said Andrew Hendifar, MD, medical director for pancreatic cancer at the Cedars-Sinai Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute. “After all, patients typically spend most of their time at home or work, not in a clinic, and their health statuses change from day to day.”
When I considered training for my next triathlon using Apple Watch as much as I could, most other triathletes shook their heads and said “I don’t get it, just use a Garmin/Suunto/Other brand?”
But I was intrigued. Apple Watch is only three versions in but has already made great steps in improving battery life and capability. It also shows a renewed focus on health and fitness, and you know Apple will be relentless in improving it each year.
Journal of Sports Medicine & Physical Fitness from
BACKGROUND:
Wearable devices are common in the health and fitness industry and provide valuable information to improve and achieve fitness goals. The Hexoskin shirt (Hx) is one such device that has been shown to be valid and reliable. The purpose of this pilot study was to compare the Hx to established methods during a maximal graded exercise test (TM) and a High-Intensity Functional Training (HIFT) session. METHODS:
Ten healthy individuals (31.0 ± 7.6 years, 76.4 ± 11.4 kg; 1.7 ± 0.1 m) volunteered for this study and completed a TM and a HIFT exercise session. During both testing sessions, respiratory measures [Respiratory Rate (RR), and Respiratory Volume (RV)] were assessed using a portable metabolic system (Cosmed K4b2; K4), and heart rate (HR) was determined via ECG in a standard 12-lead configuration. The Hx was worn during both sessions. RESULTS:
During TM, a 4% difference was noted for HR during cool down, while exercising HR and RV, along with RR during cool down were all under 10%. During HIFT, HR at rest and cool down, as well as RR during exercise were less than 10%. The variation between technologies for the remaining variables ranged between 12.3 – 39.9% and 10.9 – 41.1% for TM and HIFT, respectively. CONCLUSIONS:
The Hx smart garment may be utilized to provide select cardiorespiratory data in a TM and HIFT session. We recommend that the validity and reliability be fully established before the Hx smart garment is entirely utilized for all cardiorespiratory data and research purposes in a field-based environment.
… Just like competitors such as Catapult or STATSports, Strive Tech tracks an athlete’s movement using GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, although the tracking module is located on the waist instead of the upper body. But electrodes in the shorts can also track heart rate through the femoral artery and monitor muscle function with ECG and EMG technology. Mrvaljevic is complimentary of the pioneering industry leaders and wanted to build off their work by coupling motion tracking with physiological monitoring.
“Where I realized an opportunity is, because of my biomedical engineering study, I wanted to look more at the internal load,” he said. “Understanding how much the athlete is achieving throughout the practice via accelerations, speed, distance and those are all great, but what is happening on the inside? Fundamentally, what’s your engine doing? How many miles per gallon are you spending? What is the check engine light?”
Over the past few years I’ve covered a number of technologies that have aimed to move beyond merely recording our activity levels and towards providing constructive feedback in real-time. Some of these are helping with coaching support, such as instructing the user to work harder, whilst others provide technical feedback on form and technique.
Nowhere is such a requirement as urgent as with runners, as those with poor, heel-based technique suffer roughly twice as many injuries as those with robust, forefront techniques. New research from Saarland University wanted to see whether technology, and technology alone, could rectify matters.
“An effective analysis of running technique can only be provided by professionals or expert coaches using slow-motion videos. Amateur athletes have no access to this. However, as more and more people run long distances, exposing themselves to the risk of knee injuries and stress fractures, answering this question is more necessary than ever before,” the authors say.
The team developed a product, known as Footstriker, that is worn on the body and provides electro-stimulation (EMS) to the runner to provide live feedback regarding their technique.
In some implementations, the elliptic curve parameters are not all validated by the cryptographic algorithm implementation, which may allow a remote attacker within wireless range to inject an invalid public key to determine the session key with high probability. Such an attacker can then passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages.
… This is serious. Update your software now, and try not to think about all of the Bluetooth applications that can’t be updated.
Smaller apps designed for specific purposes are on the rise as many people tire of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. What makes communities like AllTrails, Untappd, Runkeeper, and more so popular—and will they ever outgrow what makes them great?
Uber Engineering; Danny Iland, Andrew Irish, Upamanyu Madhow and Brian Sandler from
… While GPS works well under clear skies, its location estimates can be wildly inaccurate (with a margin of error of 50 meters or more) when we need it the most: in densely populated and highly built-up urban areas, where many of our users are located. To overcome this challenge, we developed a software upgrade to GPS for Android which substantially improves location accuracy in urban environments via a client-server architecture that utilizes 3D maps and performs sophisticated probabilistic computations on GPS data available through Android’s GNSS APIs.
In this article, we discuss why GPS can perform poorly in urban environments and outline how we fix it using advanced signal processing algorithms deployed at scale on our server infrastructure.
… a team of researchers at Stanford says that achievement is within reach. The group, led by materials science and engineering associate professor Alberto Salleo and postdoctoral research fellow Onur Parlak, announced in Science Advances that they’ve developed a wearable patch that can determine how much cortisol someone is producing in seconds, using sweat drawn from the skin under the patch.
The stretchy patch pulls in the sweat through perforations to a reservoir. A membrane on top of the reservoir allows charged ions, like sodium and potassium, to pass through. Cortisol, which has no charge, can’t pass, and instead blocks the charged ions. Signals sent from an electrical sensor in the patch can be used to detect these backups and determine how much cortisol is in the sweat.
Do you know the most remarkable thing about Nike’s £200 Vaporfly Elite trainers? They actually live up to the hype. When the shoe was launched last year, Nike insisted it improved running economy by an average of 4% – a claim so astounding that it caused many sports scientists’ eyebrows to rise in scepticism, loosely aping the company’s swoosh logo.
However last week, the New York Times, having analysed 495,000 marathon and half-marathon times since 2014 using data from Strava, reached a similar conclusion. Runners who wore Vaporflys, which have a controversial carbon-fibre plate in their soles, did indeed run 3-4% quicker on average than similar runners wearing other shoes, and around 1% faster than those using the next speediest shoe.
Your first instinct might be to rush out and buy a pair – especially as a separate study in the journal Sports Medicine on elite athletes estimated that the shoes could take six minutes off a three-hour marathoner’s time. Good luck with that. The shoes appear to be almost permanently sold out, and often go for double their retail price on eBay.
Breathing is a well-described, vital and surprisingly complex behaviour, with behavioural and physiological outputs that are easy to directly measure. Key neural elements for generating breathing pattern are distinct, compact and form a network amenable to detailed interrogation, promising the imminent discovery of molecular, cellular, synaptic and network mechanisms that give rise to the behaviour. Coupled oscillatory microcircuits make up the rhythmic core of the breathing network. Primary among these is the preBötzinger Complex (preBötC), which is composed of excitatory rhythmogenic interneurons and excitatory and inhibitory pattern-forming interneurons that together produce the essential periodic drive for inspiration. The preBötC coordinates all phases of the breathing cycle, coordinates breathing with orofacial behaviours and strongly influences, and is influenced by, emotion and cognition. Here, we review progress towards cracking the inner workings of this vital core.
The North Face announced that ski mountaineer and long-time athlete Hilaree Nelson will serve as captain for the Global Athlete Team. Conrad Anker currently holds the position and will serve as co-captain with Nelson through the remainder of 2018, before Nelson fully transitions to team captain in 2019.
Nelson, who has been a The North Face athlete for almost 20 years, boasts an impressive roster of accomplishments including skiing the Himalayan summit of Cho Oyu in Tibet; double summiting Denali; bagging the first American ascent and ski descent of Papsura Peak, India; being named the 2018 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and serving as the face of the Move Mountains initiative.
Your car’s airbags are programmed to deploy when you slam into a fixed object at speeds between 8 and 14 mph. Bicycles have no air bags. And professional cyclist Alison Tetrick was flying triple-airbag-deployment fast in 2010 when, while ripping down a descent during the Cascade Cycling Classic, a crashing rider took out her front wheel sending her straight into the pavement, smashing her pelvis and rendering her unconscious for three minutes. Fifteen months later, another fluke accident took her out for the count with concussion number two.
Suffice it to say that recovery was (and continues to be) anything but easy. But this scrappy racer, born on a California cattle ranch, has learned how to pull herself up by the bootstraps, heal her wounds (including the ones you can’t always see), and get back in the saddle stronger than ever.
“The biggest thing is to accept that no matter what happens, you’re never going to be the same from day to day or moment to moment.,” Tetrick says. “We age; we get hurt; things happen in sports and life. Each day is a new day and we’re always evolving. In recovery you have to learn to push forward from where you are in that moment and strive to be the best version of yourself. Accept who you are each morning and then look to where you want to be in the future and what you have to do to get there.”
Nathaniel Peek started Spin Cycle Clothing four years ago in Adelaide, South Australia, to supply custom-made racing kit to serious cyclists, but he knew that if he wanted to grow the business he needed a point of difference.
He then combined his love of cycling – the 39-year-old has competed in all disciplines from road to mountain biking – with a decades-long career in design and technology to develop a laser scanning system that tailors each piece of clothing to the rider.
“More than 50 per cent of brands are made at the same factories in China from the same patterns,” said Peek.
“My system, which also knows the limits of the fabric, how much and which way it can stretch, is a massive point of difference.”
Recently I tested a prototype of a wearable device that is intended to help runners monitor and control the intensity of their runs. During my back-and-forth email communications with the product’s lead developer, he sent me a link to a study titled “Intensity- and Duration-Based Options to Regulate Endurance Training.” The abstract began as follows: “The regulation of endurance training is usually based on the prescription of exercise intensity. Exercise duration, another important variable of training load, is rarely prescribed by individual measures and mostly set from experience.” Questioning the validity of experience as a guide to training prescriptions, the authors, a pair of Austrian exercise physiologists, went on to try to establish a more scientific method for determining how long individual athletes should train at different intensities.
Performance in endurance sports relies on athletes’ drive, which is the sum of all factors pushing athletes to exert effort during exercise. Mental fatigue can influence endurance performance by decreasing athletes’ drive to exercise. From a psychological point of view, mental fatigue has two separate components: it can affect drive by increasing the perceived effort necessary for a given task (“I cannot do this, I am too exhausted”), or by decreasing the perceived value of the reward that can be obtained (“I do not want to do this, it is not worth it”). Neurophysiological theories confirm this dual nature of mental fatigue. Mental fatigue can activate the inhibition centers of the brain, increasing perceived effort for a task, hence decreasing drive and willingness to act. On the other hand, it may also deactivate facilitative brain centers (normally responsible for motivated behaviour and increased drive towards a reward), also resulting in decreased drive.
In this Perspective we will adopt a multidimensional approach, describing how mental fatigue interacts with drive and performance in endurance exercise. We will study the interaction between mental fatigue and other factors impacting on drive, such as perceived exertion and motivation, and examine how these factors combined result in athletes’ exercise behaviour (such as pacing) and performance. This will provide researchers, coaches and athletes with useful tools in order to understand, influence and enhance athletes’ drive in exercise, which is of high relevance in elite endurance sports, where mental fatigue, motivation and stakes are of Olympic level.
Move over pace and heart rate, there’s a new running metric in town. Power has long been used by cyclists to help produce consistent performance and now companies such as Stryd, RunVi and Garmin want to kick off a Running Power Revolution too. But is power better than running on pace or heart rate?
I armed myself with a Stryd running sensor and went along to the Dixons Carphone Race to the Stones to see what lessons I could learn while powering my way through a 100km multi-stage ultra.