… Since creating the first heart rate tracking solution more than 40 years ago, it has been our mission to help athletes of all levels to achieve their goals by providing them the most reliable smart heart rate technology and services.
“Given our long track record and continuous innovation, we consider it justified to say that we are the pioneers of sports wearable technology and heart rate measurement,” says Marco Suvilaakso, Chief Strategy Officer at Polar.
Now, we’ve taken all that experience and the lessons we’ve learned and used them to create the Polar Vantage multisport watches that lead the way to the future of sports technology.
If you’ve been on the fence about the Apple Watch, I understand where you’re coming from. Early versions were at least disappointing, if not perplexing, limited as much by hardware and software as Apple’s pricing and vision. Holdouts still ask the same question today as everyone did in 2015: If you have an iPhone, do you really need an Apple Watch, too?
For the first time, I’d submit that the answer is yes. The original Apple Watch was a sluggish dud that Apple treated as a full-priced public beta, and its Series 1, 2, and 3 sequels have been iPhone “S”-caliber tweaks that took the first form factor as far as it could go. Three years later, the Apple Watch Series 4 has arrived as the family’s first truly massive upgrade, and finally delivers an excellent end-to-end user experience, notably including health-related features that can’t be found in any iPhone.
Excellent battery life for a smartwatch. Combination of rotating bezel and touchscreen navigation make it a pleasure to use. Tracks a wide variety of exercise activities.
Pregnant women could use a “wearable” app to detect whether they have or are susceptible to a condition that leads to serious health complications for them or their unborn child.
A Purdue University research team, led by Craig Goergen, an assistant professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, is developing a low-cost automated early detection sensor of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that can lead to high blood pressure and cause both organ damage and premature birth.
“We hope this will allow us to predict and prevent preeclampsia and reduce the number of children born prematurely each year. This could also reduce the long-term health complications for mothers,” Goergen said.
We may not think about them much, but antennas are everywhere. In our phones, in our cars, in the anti-theft tags on the clothes we buy, and as the Internet of Things becomes an ever-more-present reality, they’re showing up in new places, like microwaves and lamps. Engineers have therefore been looking for methods of making antennas smaller, lighter and easier to apply.
Now, researchers at Drexel University have developed a method for creating nearly invisible antennas on almost any surface by literally spraying them on like paint. The antennas are made from a special two-dimensional metallic material called MXene. MXene powder can be dissolved in water to create a paint that is then airbrushed on. In tests, even a layer as thin as just 62 nanometers – thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper – could communicate effectively. Performance maxed out at just 8 microns, a point at which the spray-on antennas worked just as well as those currently used in mobile devices and wireless routers.
… Sources with direct knowledge of the product have confirmed to BetaKit that North is, in fact, Thalmic’s wearable smart glasses play and consumer-facing brand. The company declined to provide comment to BetaKit for this story. However, since its publication, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and Initialized (a Thalmic investor) has confirmed the Thalmic-North connection.
Hangzhou International Marathon on Nov. 4 will use face recognition to prevent fraud and highlight the advanages of modern technology, said organizers.
Yang Yong, general manager of the road race project at Alibaba Group’s sports arm Alisports, said Hangzhou will increase the use of technology in this year’s race, which passes along West Lake and Qiantang River.
The reformed company, which has about 110 employees compared to 600 at Jawbone’s peak, has found new life as a medical subscription service that founder Hosain Rahman describes as a “check-engine light” for humans.
Maxim Integrated Products’ first Health Sensor Platform (HSP) made it much easier to build wearable devices. However, the latest version—HSP 2.0 (Fig. 1)—lets developers monitor electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, and body temperature. The modular system is designed to handle upgrades or enhancements, which in the long run can save developers months of design and implementation work.
… We’ll offer a rundown of new features that distinguish HERO7 Black from its most recent predecessor, HERO6 Black, and explain the differences between the three new HERO7 cameras—so if you’re thinking of buying one to shoot high-definition video and photos, you can decide for yourself which features are worth investing in.
Binghamton University is now the center of flexible hybrid electronics for a national company.
NextFlex chose BU to design, develop, and manufacture new technology that will help improve our area and get Binghamton on the map.
“It recognizes that Binghamton has been a center of activities in New York and getting a lot of different organizations to work with them,” said NextFlex Executive Director Malcolm Thompson.
… Worldwide efforts to make sodium-ion batteries just as functional as lithium-ion batteries have long since controlled sodium’s tendency to explode, but not yet resolved how to prevent sodium-ions from “getting lost” during the first few times a battery charges and discharges. Now, Purdue University researchers made a sodium powder version that fixes this problem and holds a charge properly.
“Adding fabricated sodium powder during electrode processing requires only slight modifications to the battery production process,” said Vilas Pol, Purdue associate professor of chemical engineering. “This is one potential way to progress sodium-ion battery technology to the industry.”
The work, published in a recent issue of the Journal of Power Sources, aligns with Purdue’s giant leaps celebration, acknowledging the university’s global advancements made in health, space, artificial intelligence and sustainability as part of Purdue’s 150th anniversary. Those are the four themes of the yearlong celebration’s Ideas Festival, designed to showcase Purdue as an intellectual center solving real-world issues.
The next generation of wearable activity sensors will not be strap-on devices that can be lost or forgotten, say researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, instead they may be threads or fabric patches sewn into shirts and pants to offer light, care-free, continuous monitoring of movement that could help doctors, therapists and coaches respond to changes that warrant concern or improve performance.
Computer scientist Deepak Ganesan, materials scientist Trisha Andrew and computer engineer Jeremy Gummeson, all part of UMass Amherst’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences’ Center for Personalized Health Monitoring, recently received a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Computer Systems Research program to advance so-called “smart textiles.”
As Ganesan explains, “Textiles with computing elements are coming, and we are building some of the expertise that will lead to practical advances. This is early days, and we don’t even know some of the problems we’ll run into, but we’re building little things and trying to understand the interaction of hardware, electronics, software, computing and analysis that will all go into their success.”
Exactly what is a Glacier National Park if all of its glaciers have melted? And should Joshua Tree National Park still keep its name if there are no more Joshua Trees left there? These aren’t just remote possibilities, but very real threats.
Over the past century, average temperatures in our national parks rose at twice the rate compared to the country’s other regions. At the same time, the parks also have been getting less rainfall than other areas in the Unites States. That means more fires, more ice retreating, less wildlife, and the overall reserves’ ecosystems falling apart. In the coming decades, many parks would lose the iconic attractions they have been historically famous for, scientists warn. And the parks do more than please the eye. “National parks conserve our most intact natural places,” says Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist and climate change scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “They also help assure human well-being by protecting water resources and storing carbon.”
… A compelling rejoinder to the noxiously anti-democratic program of land privatizers is Steven Davis’s new book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case against Privatization and Transfer. The chief argument for privatization, writes Davis, is based on a reductionist calculation of the operating budget of public lands agencies compared with the revenue those lands produce. Government statistics show that it costs ten times more to run the Forest Service than the service receives from users of the national forests. Therefore, goes the logic, junk it. In fact, the public lands system as a whole operates at a significant loss. In 2014, total appropriations for all federal land agencies came to $11 billion while revenue was only $1 billion. From the national parks to the national forests and monuments to the wildlife refuges operated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, it’s all money down the drain. They are economically inefficient. Therefore, the nation ought to abolish them. “To the advocates of privatization,” writes Davis, “the government’s management of public land is the main culprit in the thwarting of rational, efficient, and productive resource policy.”
I called Davis at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is a professor of political science at Edgewood College, to ask about the genesis of his book. “My project was to examine and dismantle the arguments that endlessly spew forth from rightwing think tanks and Koch-endowed professorships. There is quite an academic literature out there that begs refutation,” he told me. “The privatizers fancy themselves as rational and analytical, and I wanted to show that even on their own turf, they are dead wrong, empirically.”
The Washington Post, Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham from
Life insurance company John Hancock made a splash last week with the news that soon all its policies would come bundled with the option to let the company track your fitness — via either a website and app, or through the use of a fitness tracker like an Apple Watch or Fitbit.
The move underscores how fitness tracker data is an as-yet largely untapped gold mine for businesses — particularly in industries like insurance, whose financial bottom line directly depends on the health of their customers. John Hancock isn’t particularly shy about this: “The longer people live, the more money we make,” as the company’s CEO, Brooks Tingle, put it to the New York Times.
The published research on Fitbits and similar devices, however, has yet to uncover a clear link between fitness tracking and fitness, to say nothing of longevity and mortality, or of insurance companies’ profits. But there is some solid evidence that if the use of the devices is paired with incentives like rewards, challenges and leaderboards (“gamified,” in social science parlance) people can see real health benefits. It’s probably no accident, then, that the John Hancock policies lean heavily on those kinds of incentives.
Thule has once again stepped up with a quality, super convenient way to transport your bikes. The new Thule Helium Platform is a hitch-mounted bike carrier that holds bikes in place without any contact with the frame. Keep that shiny bike shiny!
This year, Triathlete handed out Interbike Innovation Awards for the three consumer products that stood out at the show. The winners had to exhibit at the show and produce a product that will be available in the next year to the general public. Each of these three winners stood out as innovative, outside of the box ideas that could help push cycling gear forward.
In 2017, according the [American Community Survey], the share of commuters cycling to work actually dipped by 4.7 percent compared with the previous year. Less than 1 percent of American commuters regularly use their bicycles to get to work. But 84 percent of the seventy largest cities in the US have seen an upward cycle commute trend over the past 12 years.
The most interesting aspect to these numbers—and certainly not a new one—is the uncovering of a profound cycle commuting gap. In the five US cities with the highest share of cycle commuters (Davis, Santa Cruz, and Palo Alto, all in California, along with Boulder, Colorado, and Somerville, Massachusetts), an average 11.7 percent took bicycles to work last year. But in the next five (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, Miami Beach, Florida, Portland, Oregon, and Ames, Iowa), just 7 percent do. Take cities 20 to 25 (Redwood City, California, San Francisco, Bloomington, Indiana, Portland, Maine, and Salt Lake City), and just 3.1 percent of those cities take bikes to work.
Eos; Geoffrey Blewitt, William C. Hammond, and Corné Kreemer from
Thanks to a series of innovations and exponential growth over the past 3 decades, GPS has become an important tool for geodesy and geophysics, pushing forward the science and precise measurement of the Earth’s various active processes on land, water, and ice and in the atmosphere. GPS now forms an integral component of the newest generation of Earth science and natural hazard assessment capabilities for monitoring and understanding earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, mountain growth, aquifers, sea level, glaciers, ice sheets, mantle flow, terrestrial water storage, and water vapor, to name a few.
The field of geodesy—which measures the size, shape, gravitational field, and spin of the Earth and how they all change over time—was the first to use GPS for science. In fact, geodesy had been instrumental in improving GPS data analysis that enables pinpoint positioning using high-precision equipment. But now, the scope of applications is broadening rapidly.
We are witnessing an exponential explosion in the number of geodetic-quality GPS stations around the globe, in the amount of data collected, and in the quantity and variety of data products for scientific applications. This explosion is both a cause and an effect of scientists starting to use GPS data from many traditionally nongeodetic disciplines. Moreover, feedback from multiple disciplines leads to improved models of geodetic observables, thus improving GPS data products for all.
Spending large chunks of time simply getting Earth science data into a usable form for analysis is a common situation for researchers working with the big datasets that come from NASA field, airborne and satellite missions. Downloading huge files, converting data formats, locating the same study areas in multiple datasets, writing code to distinguish different land types in a satellite image – these types of tasks eat into time scientists would rather be using to analyze the actual information in the data.
That’s where the ACCESS program comes in. Part of the Earth Science Data Systems division since 2005, ACCESS finds innovative ways to streamline that cumbersome processing time. The program funds two-year research projects to improve behind-the-scenes data management and provide ready-to-use datasets and services to scientists, [Sara] Lubkin said.
The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool is brought to you by the Office of Postsecondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. This analysis cutting tool was designed to provide rapid customized reports for public inquiries relating to equity in athletics data. The data are drawn from the OPE Equity in Athletics Disclosure Website database.