… the University of Michigan announced that it has launched a new three-year study that pairs Apple Watch user data with information from EHRs, survey data, genetic information and other health-related data. While the study’s primary goal is to better understanding the relationship between sensors, these data and individuals’ health outcomes, the university also plans to make the resulting integrated data pool available to researchers for future studies of these topics and other related areas of investigation.
The MIPACT (Michigan Predictive Activity and Clinical Trajectories) study has already enrolled 1,000 participants, according to the announcement, with plans to bring in thousands of additional patients through the Michigan Medical clinical system.
Of all the children in the United States, about 20 percent of them are affected by childhood obesity, and some fitness tracker brands have created their own kid-centric products to help combat the epidemic. But what’s still to be determined is whether the devices help or hurt kids in the long run.
Fitbit and Garmin are two of the most popular brands to release a children’s line. Fitbit even recently announced a new and updated version of its original children’s Ace tracker, the Ace 2.
“Right now, unfortunately, I don’t think we have enough research or data to be able to say one way or the other what the effect will be,” Doctor Blaise Nemeth, a pediatrician and member of the Council on Sports, Medicine and Fitness for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told Newsweek.
Fitbit has just announced a lineup of new wearables for 2019, but some of the deeper health features it’s long been promising still haven’t landed. In 2017, Fitbit announced it was working on tracking sleep apnea, and in the same year it was reported that the company was working on atrial fibrillation detection.
CEO James Park has since confirmed the company is working on the latter, but neither feature has “gone live” on any of Fitbit’s devices, despite all of its latest wearables featuring a (mostly dormant) SpO2 sensor, which can be used to diagnose apnea and AFib. This also means Fitbit is now trailing behind Apple, which included an AFib detector in the latest Apple Watch Series 4.
Aexos (Advanced Exoskeletal Systems), a Kickstarter-funded wearables company based in Waterloo, has announced the first shipment of its wearables product, a “smart shirt” designed to reduce whiplash of the head and neck in high intensity sports. … The technology embedded in the collar is designed to stiffen upon detecting high-speed, abrupt head movement, which improves neck stability and reducing the risk of injury and concussion. Aexos said Halo reduces head movement during collisions by up to 46 percent, without affecting the range of motion or mobility of the athlete. The shirt seeks to provide neck support, while reducing stress placed upon the rest of the upper body.
Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears.
And saliva, naturally.
University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world’s first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.
“Ultimately, technological advances in wearables are constrained by human biology itself,” the study said.
… New Cornell research advances the design of solid-state batteries, a technology that is inherently safer and more energy-dense than today’s lithium-ion batteries, which rely on flammable liquid electrolytes for fast transfer of chemical energy stored in molecular bonds to electricity. By starting with liquid electrolytes and then transforming them into solid polymers inside the electrochemical cell, the researchers take advantage of both liquid and solid properties to overcome key limitations in current battery designs.
Rechargeable lithium metal batteries with increased energy density, performance, and safety may be possible with a newly-developed, solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI), according to Penn State researchers.
As the demand for higher-energy-density lithium metal batteries increases — for electric vehicles, smartphones, and drones — stability of the SEI has been a critical issue halting their advancement because a salt layer on the surface of the battery’s lithium electrode insulates it and conducts lithium ions.
“This layer is very important and is naturally formed by the reaction between the lithium and the electrolyte in the battery,” said Donghai Wang, professor of mechanical and chemical engineering. “But it doesn’t behave very well, which causes a lot of problems.”
The first energy-harvesting, triboelectric fabric that is both waterproof and capable of converting energy from multiple sources – such as wind, rain and human movement – has been developed by researchers in Taiwan and the US. The development could lead to myriad applications in wearable technology, self-powered sensors and ambient energy harvesting.
Access to clean water remains one of the biggest challenges facing humankind. A breakthrough by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin may offer a new solution through solar-powered technology that absorbs moisture from the air and returns it as clean, usable water.
The breakthrough, described in a recent issue of the journal Advanced Materials, could be used in disaster situations, water crises or poverty-stricken areas and developing countries. The technology relies on hydrogels, gel-polymer hybrid materials designed to be “super sponges” that can retain large amounts of water.
A research team led by Guihua Yu in UT Austin’s Cockrell School of Engineering combined hydrogels that are both highly water absorbent and can release water upon heating. This unique combination has been successfully proved to work in humid and dry weather conditions and is crucial to enabling the production of clean, safe drinking water from the air.
My bodega is only a little bigger than my studio apartment, and sells no fewer than 10 kinds of Muscle Milk. In the drink cases, crowded with bottled water, Snapple, and Arizona iced tea, Muscle Milk occupies prime, eye-level real estate, protein counts splashed across the front of the bottles in black, bold lettering: 15, 20, 35 grams. Inside the bottles are creamy shakes in flavors like Chocolate, Strawberries ‘n Crème, and Mango Tangerine. The branding is literally protein-themed, and the higher the number, the greater the halo: protein is the reason for its central location and fluorescent spotlight.
We all need more protein, even if few of us know why. Protein has emerged as an undisputed Good Choice over the past 50 years of warring scientific studies slagging fat and carbs, endless opportunistic fad diets, and skyrocketing obesity in America. Just as one might look at all the world’s religions and decide that, while none is correct, there must be “something out there,” one might look at all the world’s weight-loss diets and note that, while they contradict each other in many ways, they all seem to preach protein, so protein must be good.
As the outdoor movement gains momentum by the day, brands and retailers are pondering, “Who is my next customer?” ISPO, the German trade fair, and the market research institute Rheingold partnered to provide new insights into current and prospective outdoorists, and the way they think and feel.
Researchers broke the study up into seven parts, all regarding the wishes and desires of outdoor consumers. The full report is packed with valuable information, but here is a recap of what researchers discovered, featuring quotes from anonymous study participants.
E-bikes are boosting the German bicycle industry as the sales volume hiked by a staggering 36 percent in 2018 compared to 2017. No less than 980,000 units were sold last year. Today every one out of four bicycles sold in Germany is an electric one.
Trek have been teasing the imminent release of a new cycling technology. On Tuesday, WaveCel was announced. While it won’t change the way you ride your bike, it’s designed to better protect your head in the case of a crash whether in a race, on a group ride, on the trails or while commuting.
… The initial findings reveal that 99% find the outdoors has a positive impact on their mental wellbeing. However, in what may come as a surprise to many (it certainly did to me), the results also show that the average mental wellbeing level out of all those surveyed was lower than the Office of National Statistics UK average for women.
Longer steps with load carriage is common in shorter Soldiers when matching pace with taller Soldiers whereas shorter steps are hypothesized to reduce risk of injury with load carriage. The effects of load carriage with and without step length manipulation on loading patterns of three commonly injured structures were determined: Achilles tendon, patellofemoral joint (PFJ) and medial tibiofemoral joint (mTFJ).
To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody can now buy compute power in the cloud, though, and as the Boston and Tel Aviv-based startup ClimaCell is setting out to prove, there are now also plenty of other ways to get climate data thanks to a variety of relatively non-traditional sensors that can help generate more precise local weather predictions.
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Now you may say that others, like Dark Sky, for example, are already doing that with their hyperlocal forecasts. But ClimaCell’s approach is very different, and with that has attracted as clients airlines like Delta, JetBlue and United, sports teams like the New England Patriots and agtech companies like Netafim.
How can the law account for the value of complex, nonhuman entities such as rivers, lakes, forests and ecosystems? At a time of runaway climate change, when the Earth’s biosphere is on the brink of collapse and species extinctions are accelerating, this has become a vital question.
Some theorists argue that there’s a clear historical precedent for what we should do, arising from the struggle for universal human rights. The law and discourse of human rights, commonly traced back to the Enlightenment, has held sway over the sections of the Western public for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps we should take the idea of ‘the human’ as a rights-bearer and extend it to the complex, nonhuman systems that we wish to protect, that we know are deserving of care and concern.
High Country News, 5280 magazine, Jay Bouchard from
… To better understand the strength and scope of snow barreling down mountainsides in Colorado, we set out to learn what exactly has led to this intense avalanche cycle. Is it merely a lot of damn snow? Another catastrophic by-product of a warming climate? According to snow scientists and forecasters with whom we spoke, the answer is not nearly so simple. Yes, Colorado is experiencing a banner snow year. Yes, the climate is changing. But neither of those factors, they say, are solely responsible for the intensity of avalanches we’ve seen this month. Instead, it’s been a mixture of weather events over the past five months — a “perfect storm” of sorts — that created unstable snowpack across the state.
“It’s a combination of events,” says Karl Birkeland, director of the U.S. Forest Service National Avalanche Center. “You get your biggest avalanches not just when you get a big storm, but when you get a big storm that’s on top of a series of events that set up over your season.”