Samsung’s next Galaxy Unpacked event is fast approaching and we know the event will primarily focus on its flagship S10 series of phones. According to previous leaks and rumors, it’s also likely that we’ll see some new wearable devices on February 20, something Samsung has all but confirmed with an accidental leak.
Fitbit is renowned for its wearables and fitness focused devices, but the company hasn’t really dabbled in fitness devices focused on the youth market. The Fitbit Ace was launched last year and remains the only wearable the company has that’s targeted more towards a younger customer, but the company is looking to change this with a new fitness tracker that’s kid-friendly.
Today we can exclusively reveal the first images of this tracker, which is probably a new line for Fitbit given that the Ace is a smart band rather than full fitness tracker with display.
The Atlantic, Object Lessons, Andrew Bomback and Michelle Au from
Wearable medical technology promises a new, and better, way to manage personal health. Whether it’s Fitbits counting steps and calories burned, continuous blood glucose monitors aiding insulin dosing for diabetic patients, or Bluetooth earpieces offering round-the-clock heart rate and body temperature tracking, wearable devices sell the promise of the coldly clinical made portably intimate. Continuous EKG monitoring, like that available in the latest Apple Watch, might seem like a small technological leap, putting what was once the sole purview of hospitals and doctor’s offices neatly around a consumer’s wrist.
But continuous EKG monitoring is a little different from other, more discrete medical information. Unlike devices that measure more cleanly numerical metrics—step counts or target heart rates or blood glucose levels—a wearable EKG display doesn’t give the user an easy sense of hitting targets or falling short. Reading an EKG tracing is nuanced and interpretive, more art than math. A Fitbit gives you a number. An EKG paints a picture.
… “We are essentially putting a mobile research lab on the feet of athletes all over the world, and creating a whole new frontier to accelerate both product development and sports science,” Michael Donaghu, Nike’s vice president of innovation, said at an event last month.
It makes sense that people are willing to share information with fitness apps, which they downloaded to help them live healthier lives. But the apps can’t help unless you hand over information like your diet and exercise routine.
“Even with all of the privacy breach issues, consumers are still willing to give information,” Cleary said. “You just gotta show them what they get in return.”
Kopin, the company behind SOLOS Smart Glasses, has confirmed it is teaming up with Carmichael Training Systems (CTS). The new partnership will provide CTS coaches, athletes and training camp participants access to SOLOS Smart Glasses.
In a release, Kopin added that ‘This partnership will bring together a company at the leading edge of performance-enabled wearable technology with a leader in the endurance sports coaching space to help athletes better utilize their real-time performance data to improve both effectiveness and safety when training.’
… In the tech world it’s often said that products can be ‘ahead of their time’, and in some ways, that’s exactly what happened initially with RunScribe. It simply hit about 12 months too early to take advantage of Garmin’s Connect IQ platform – which would have been perfect for it (and likely accelerated it). Instead, from a consumer standpoint, it got caught in the cross-fire not once, but twice. Still, they chugged on.
And at this point the company is simply finding more success with universities, clinics, and labs that are looking for running gait/efficiency related information.
For 26 years the Earth Guardians have been working to amplify the voices of the world’s youth in the environmental and social justice movements. What started as a single school initiative in Maui, Hawaii, has grown to encompass 44 different countries, inspiring and empowering tens of thousands of young people to stand up for their future, to fight for their planet.
Now based in Boulder, this youth-powered nonprofit is educating a new generation of activists approaching climate change as a social justice issue. They’ve sued the Trump administration over the approval for the Keystone XL pipeline, advocated for municipalizing Boulder’s energy grid and even helped establish a moratorium on fracking. Recently, a group of Earth Guardians’ youth plaintiffs sued the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission for failing to consider public health and the environment in its rulemakings. Known as the “Martinez Case,” the lawsuit made it all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court before getting shot down in January 2019.
Despite the loss, the Earth Guardians are still forging on, fighting against climate change. And soon they’ll have a techy new environmental tool to spread their message: the EarthTracks app.
… this is actually probably the most interesting and useful new feature Strava’s rolled out in years. Is it perfect or complete? No – it’s still beta, but it’s definitely cool as it stands here today – and it’s something you can use immediately. Plus, it’s simple enough I can write about it in under 4,000 words.
See, previously to create a route on Strava you had to tap your way through street by street, trying to get exactly the route you wanted. And you had to do it on the desktop. Now though, you can merely swipe your finger in the direction you want to go, and it’ll automatically generated the route based on heatmap style data from millions of activities.
… To develop and test technologies for hardier navigation satellites and augmentation systems the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) have been working on an on-orbit test bed called the Navigation Technology Satellite-3. NTS-3 will be used to demonstrate technology and new concepts of operation including experimental antennas, flexible and secure signals, increased automation, and use of commercial ground assets. Harris Corp. was tapped to be the prime contractor late last year and is expected to have the spacecraft available for launch by 2022.
“The National Defense Strategy tells us we must evolve our nation’s Position, Navigation, and Timing capabilities to be more resilient,” said AFRL Space Vehicles Director Col. Eric Felt. “NTS-3 is all about resiliency, and I am incredibly excited about the resiliency experiments our SMC, AFRL, and Harris team will be able to conduct with NTS-3’s innovative and flexible hardware, software, and waveforms.”
In what is unquestionably the biggest sports tech news of the year, Garmin announced today the acquisition of Tacx – the privately held Dutch company that makes trainers, water bottles, and tools. This news no doubt will have people turning their heads for quite some time, and will have even bigger ramifications across the indoor training industry.
The reasons behind the acquisition haven’t been detailed by Garmin. However, their press release does hint at some of the areas that Garmin might focus on (such as the Tacx indoor training platform) – but on the whole it’s mostly just generic corporate acquisition PR fluff outlining the purpose of each company.
Smart mattress company Eight Sleep is announcing its newest product today, The Pod. Co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti described it, succinctly, as “Nest for your bed.”
Eight has been focused on bed temperature for a while, first by offering a smart mattress cover and then a smart mattress that allows owners to adjust the surface temperature and even set different temperatures for different sides of the bed. But The Pod goes even further, with a smart temperature mode that will change bed temperature throughout the night to improve your sleep.
I am training for several big races this year and can’t seem to find a good pair of wireless headphones that aren’t insanely priced and looking for recommendations. Love to hear what everyone likes best!
SFU professor Woo Soo Kim is leading the research team’s
discovery involving the use of a wood-derived cellulose material to replace the plastics and polymeric materials currently used in electronics.
Additionally, 3D printing can give flexibility to add or embed functions onto 3D shapes or textiles, creating greater functionality.
“Our eco-friendly 3D printed cellulose sensors can wirelessly transmit data during their life, and then can be disposed without concern of environmental contamination,” says Kim, a professor in the School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering. The SFU research is being carried out at PowerTech Labs in Surrey, which houses several state-of-the-art 3D printers used to advance the research.
When a technology developed by university researchers is licensed and integrated into a commercial product, that’s considered a resounding success. But when that same product eventually benefits student-athletes at the researchers’ own university, that’s cause for special celebration.
This was exactly the case for an advanced foam technology developed by engineers at Florida State University’s High Performance Materials Institute. The foam, which was originally designed for use in prosthetics, now provides critically supportive padding in the TayCo Ankle Brace, a sophisticated bracing system used by athletes at Florida State.
Along with several FSU football players, star softball player Jessie Warren was one of many notable athletes to benefit from the brace, which was designed by an athletic trainer at the University of Notre Dame. Last summer, Warren could be seen wearing the brace during her team’s historic run to the national championship.
… “There’s a fair bit of Darwinism at play at Aspen Mountain,” says Andy Docken, general manager of the Aspen Mountain Ski & Snowboard School. To survive, instructors must adapt to their clients’ complicated needs, both on and off the slopes.
As I realized quickly during a stint on Docken’s team, hosting the best of the best in every field—from New York financiers to Hollywood royalty—is just as much of an expertly coordinated dance as zigzagging down a black diamond. Sure, it’s fun to slay pow at one of the world’s most elite resorts, but I was also taking clients shopping for artwork the price of a house, dodging flurries of airborne Champagne corks, and busting midmountain trysts at the end of each shift. Here’s what I learned about everyone’s favorite winter pastime.
Few sights are as instantly recognizable, and few sites speak more fully to American nationalism. Standing on the South Rim in 1903, President Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed it “one of the great sights every American should see.”
It’s true. Every visitor today knows the Grand Canyon as a unique testimony to Earth’s history and an icon of American experience. But visitors may not know why. Probably they don’t know that it was big and annoying long before it was grand and inspiring. Likely, they don’t appreciate that the work of appreciating so strange a scene has been as astonishing as its geological sculpting. Other than a pilgrimage to a sacred site, they may not understand just what they are seeing.
As Grand Canyon National Park celebrates its centennial on Feb. 26, 2019, it’s worth recalling the peculiar way the canyon became grand and what this has meant.
Politics doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. In this era of brinkmanship and braggadocio, when official Washington lurches from crisis to crisis, with shutdowns and smash-mouth politics, policymakers sometimes forget that one person does not need to lose for another person to win.
The Senate’s 92-to-8 vote last night to advance the biggest public lands bill in a decade, maybe even a generation, amid divided government is a case study for how lawmaking is supposed to work. There were compromises that delivered a little something for everyone across the ideological spectrum, even if no one really got everything they wanted. Unlike so much legislation that gets drafted at the last minute and passed in the middle of the night, this circulated and percolated for years. There were hearings, markups and good-faith negotiations. When a handful of holdouts tried to insert poison pills during the amendment process to torpedo the bill, Republicans and Democrats stuck together. It was old-school and harked back to a time when Congress worked.
As an immigrant seeking a place to belong, I couldn’t have felt more out-of-place than when I moved to America shortly before the 2016 presidential election. And as the vitriol escalated, I never expected to find solace on two wheels.
Here’s how it happened: Nearing 30, I found myself yearning for a previous life. As an international economist, I lived and worked in Africa for most of my 20s. But after a while, I longed for familiarity, to not be instantly labeled and treated as an outsider because of how I looked and spoke: a South Asian woman with a North American accent. I missed, too, my home in Canada. Jobs in international economics are rare in North America, so I was delighted when I found one in Denver in September of 2016. Colorado seemed to offer everything I wanted: a short flight to my mom in Calgary, the mountains, and a climate that made it easy to be outside year-round. Only after I arrived, in a daze of reverse culture shock, did I look up the statistics: 80 percent of Denver’s population was white. I was nearly as much an outsider here as I’d been in Africa.
A new study published today in the International Journal of Sports Medicine has found that exercise efficiency decreases in recreational cyclists when they pedal very hard, incorporating more revolutions per minute.
… Many cyclists are using various sensors to measure factors like heart rate, power, location and speed. Such data are of course valuable as such, but the problem is that almost all data reporting and analysis happens offline (and not in real time). Until recently, there was no integrated platform with real-time data allowing for continuous tracking, interacting and monitoring of cyclists.
In collaboration with various partners, a real-time data-driven cycling experience has been developed. ‘CONAMO’ (CONtinuous Athlete MOnitoring in cycling) is founded on a wireless mobile network for data collection and analysis (Antwerp University & imec). This proves to be valuable during cycling training and at cycling events. Real-time updates allow coaches to monitor athletes. In this way they enhance their cycling performance… and go for the win!
… Bozeman/Gallatin County presently is inhabited by around 105,000 human denizens. One of every ten Montanans dwells here. But within 24 years, given a three percent growth rate, the number will double.
It means that Bozeman/Gallatin, by 2041, will equal the size of Salt Lake City proper (minus its suburbs). Even more sobering, in less than half a century, 2065, based on the same rate of annual growth, there will be a population of 420,000 (equal to all the residents of the entire Greater Yellowstone today).
Fresh from redefining the kilogram and other fundamental measures, the guardians of the metric system have set their sights on another upgrade: new prefixes for outrageously large and small numbers.
A proposal lodged with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in Paris recommends new names—ronna and quecca—as prefixes for 1027 and 1030, respectively. They would be joined by their microscopic counterparts, ronto for 10−27, and quecto for 10−30. If approved, the new terms could be formally introduced in 2022. They would be the first prefixes added since 1991.
The planned update responds to the massive growth in global data storage.
University of Illinois, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences from
At the southern tip of the Himalayas, farmers in the Kangra region of India’s Himachal Pradesh graze cattle among rolling hills and forests. The forests, under management by the state or farmer cooperatives, are thriving. But a new University of Illinois study shows, unlike state-managed forests, farmer cooperatives directly benefit both forest health and farmers.
The finding itself may not be new – previous research and social-ecological theory suggest that land ownership leads to enhanced stewardship and improved environmental outcomes – but the study confirmed the conclusion in a new way, using machine learning.
