A couple weeks ago Garmin Released the brand spanking new Garmin Forerunner 945. Garmin’s latest offering in the “Forerunner” lineup. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one! The Forerunner 945 sits in the flagship position in this series replacing the previous Garmin Forerunner 935 that was wildly popular with triathletes, cyclists, and runners alike. I always looked past the Garmin Forerunner series as historically they left out some of the key features I look for in a backcountry/trail/ultra watch like full navigation and mapping capabilities. Not this time! When I saw the spec list I knew I HAD to have one as it looked like it fixed all the minor quibbles I didn’t love about my current Fenix 5 Plus. To over simplify things Garmin has essentially taken the guts of the Fenix 5 Plus series and transplanted them into a smaller, lighter form factor. Oh yeah, and they even added a few features not available in the Fenix 5 Plus line! So it’s a no-brainer right? Well not exactly. Lets dive a bit deeper.
Background: Activity trackers are now ubiquitous in certain populations, with potential applications for health promotion and monitoring and chronic disease management. Understanding the accuracy of this technology is critical to the appropriate and productive use of wearables in health research. Although other peer-reviewed validations have examined other features (eg, steps and heart rate), no published studies to date have addressed the accuracy of automatic activity type detection and duration accuracy in wearable trackers.
Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the ability of 4 commercially available wearable activity trackers (Fitbits Flex 2, Fitbit Alta HR, Fitbit Charge 2, and Garmin Vívosmart HR), in a controlled setting, to correctly and automatically identify the type and duration of the physical activity being performed.
Methods: A total of 8 activity types, including walking and running (on both a treadmill and outdoors), a run embedded in walking bouts, elliptical use, outdoor biking, and pool lap swimming, were tested by 28 to 34 healthy adult participants (69 total participants who participated in some to all activity types). Actual activity type and duration were recorded by study personnel and compared with tracker data using descriptive statistics and mean absolute percent error (MAPE).
Results: The proportion of trials in which the activity type was correctly identified was 93% to 97% (depending on the tracker) for treadmill walking, 93% to 100% for treadmill running, 36% to 62% for treadmill running when preceded and followed by a walk, 97% to 100% for outdoor walking, 100% for outdoor running, 3% to 97% for using an elliptical, 44% to 97% for biking, and 87.5% for swimming. When activities were correctly identified, the MAPE of the detected duration versus the actual activity duration was between 7% and 7.9% for treadmill walking, 8.7% and 144.8% for treadmill running, 23.6% and 28.9% for treadmill running when preceded and followed by a walk, 4.9% and 11.8% for outdoor walking, 5.6% and 9.6% for outdoor running, 9.7% and 13% for using an elliptical, 9.5% and 17.7% for biking, and was 26.9% for swimming.
Conclusions: In a controlled setting, wearable activity trackers provide accurate recognition of the type of some common physical activities, especially outdoor walking and running and walking on a treadmill. The accuracy of measurement of activity duration varied considerably by activity type and tracker model and was poor for complex sets of activity, such as a run embedded within 2 walking segments. [full text]
Since the first Fitbit came on the market in 2008, wearable fitness trackers have been promising to help motivate us to get healthier and stay active. But for many people, especially those living in low-income neighborhoods, getting fit is more complicated than simply knowing how many steps you’ve taken.
Being active is more difficult in low-income neighborhoods, says Andrea Grimes Parker, an assistant professor at Northeastern, who designs technology to help vulnerable and marginalized populations overcome barriers to living a healthy life. Typically, these areas have fewer parks or sidewalk spaces where it is safe for children to play. Adults working long work hours or physically taxing jobs may struggle to find the time or energy to be active. Fitbits aren’t helping to solve these problems.
… In 2019, the Fenix is now full a series of devices that are part sports watch, part smartwatch. While some Suunto watch fans may disagree, for many the Fenix has become the go-to watch for tackling the outdoors.
But it wasn’t a hit straight from the start. “It started as an outdoor watch and purely an outdoor watch,” Jon Hosler, senior product manager for Fenix tells us. “Then with the Fenix 2, we brought in a lot more multipurpose features like high-end running and cycling features and it became a more multisport watch. It had a support for a lot more sports. It also had this more rugged aesthetic that really appealed. That’s really where it really started to take off.”
Thermoregulation has substantial implications for energy consumption and human comfort and health. However, cooling technology has remained largely unchanged for more than a century and still relies on cooling the entire space regardless of the number of occupants. Personalized thermoregulation by thermoelectric devices (TEDs) can markedly reduce the cooling volume and meet individual cooling needs but has yet to be realized because of the lack of flexible TEDs with sustainable high cooling performance. Here, we demonstrate a wearable TED that can deliver more than 10°C cooling effect with a high coefficient of performance (COP > 1.5). Our TED is the first to achieve long-term active cooling with high flexibility, due to a novel design of double elastomer layers and high-ZT rigid TE pillars. Thermoregulation based on these devices may enable a shift from centralized cooling toward personalized cooling with the benefits of substantially lower energy consumption and improved human comfort.
“The present study aimed to assess if changes in speed and stroke parameters, as measured by an inertial sensor during a maximal effort swimming test, could provide an effective detection of anaerobic capacity in elite swimmers…”
“…The wearable inertial sensor could represent a feasible solution to evaluate strokes parameters allowing a timely follow-up of variations in swimming biomechanics along the course of the test and the identification of differences in biomechanical strategy between swimmers. This analysis is of interest for swimmers and coaches to characterise swimmer’s technique weakness/strength, and to plan individual race pacing strategy.”
Harvard Business Review, Moni Miyashita and Michael Brady from
… The biggest promise of artificial intelligence — accurate predictions at near-zero marginal cost — has rightly generated substantial interest in applying AI to nearly every area of healthcare. But not every application of AI in healthcare is equally well-suited to benefit. Moreover, very few applications serve as an appropriate strategic response to the largest problems facing nearly every health system: decentralization and margin pressure.
Take for example, medical imaging AI tools — an area in which hospitals are projected to spend $2 billion annually within four years. Accurately diagnosing diseases from cancers to cataracts is a complex task, with difficult-to-quantify but typically major consequences. However, the task is currently typically part of larger workflows performed by extensively trained, highly specialized physicians who are among some of the world’s best minds. These doctors might need help at the margins, but this is a job already being done. Such factors make disease diagnosis an extraordinarily difficult area for AI to create transformative change. And so the application of AI in such settings — even if beneficial to patient outcomes — is unlikely to fundamentally improve the way healthcare is delivered or to substantially lower costs in the near-term.
However, leading organizations seeking to decentralize care can deploy AI to do things that have never been done before. For example: There’s a wide array of non-acute health decisions that consumers make daily. These decisions do not warrant the attention of a skilled clinician but ultimately play a large role in determining patient’s health — and ultimately the cost of healthcare.
This morning, digital fitness company Aaptiv released its new artificial-intelligence-enabled trainer the Aaptiv Coach. The new technology uses a proprietary algorithm to personalize fitness routines and lifestyle tips to each user.
The coach was designed to give users a daily structure and help them fit workouts into their routines. It will also give users specific Aaptiv workouts that will meet their needs and goal.
Through an industry-academia partnership and a recently-released request for proposals, the Air Force Research Laboratory is looking to advance human-monitoring research and development for the future warfighter.
The request for proposals, announced May 6, 2019, targets projects designed to accelerate innovations in health monitoring, diagnostics, and performance augmentation. Specifically, topics of interest include wearable human-monitoring capabilities. The effort is being managed in a partnership between AFRL and SEMI, a global industry association of manufacturing companies.
In 2018, SEMI partnered with AFRL to facilitate and manage additional growth in the Nano-Bio Materials Consortium, a public-private partnership of technology stakeholders. NBMC seeks to bring together entities from across the supply chain—from materials suppliers to system integrators, from technology investors to defense end users and policy makers—to ensure a robust and emerging domestic supply chain for technologies enabled by nano-bio materials, which are expected to have great importance to human-monitoring technologies.
… the company has announced the all-terrain Garmin Overlander, an all-in-one GPS designed for people who want to explore the remote regions of the great outdoors. It comes with built-in topography maps for off-grid guidance covering public land boundaries and 4×4 roads in North and South America. The seven-inch touchscreen color device also comes preloaded with adventure-specific points of interest and campground locations, all available without cell signal.
Spotify is about to begin publicly testing its first hardware: a voice-controlled smart assistant for cars, meant to help Spotify learn how people consume audio while they’re driving. As part of the test, some Premium users will receive the device for free.
The device, called Car Thing, plugs into a vehicle’s 12-volt outlet (aka a cigarette lighter) for power and connects to both a person’s car and phone over Bluetooth. The device can be activated by saying, “Hey, Spotify,” followed by a request for whatever the person wants to hear. It’ll be linked to a user’s Spotify account, so they can access their playlists.
… At the core of Fluid Inside’s approach to protecting an athlete’s head and brain is something called the Fluid Pod. These rather nondescript looking pads line the inside of every helmet that uses the company’s system. The pods are filled with a liquid that closely mimics the cerebrospinal fluids (CSF) that serve as the first line of defense when protecting our brains. The company’s pods do much the same by creating an additional buffer that can absorb the energy generated from an impact and minimize how much of that energy is transferred on to the head.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are unfortunate occurrences during military training and deployment. Because mild TBIs can be experienced without presenting obvious signs of head trauma or facial lacerations, they are the most difficult type to diagnose at the time of the injury and patients themselves may perceive the impact as mild or harmless. TBIs are cumulative, so treating a patient within the “golden hour” – the first 60 minutes after being injured – is crucial for improved long-term recovery.
Dr. Jie Huang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Missouri S&T, is working to meet the need for recognizing TBIs by developing technology that enables autonomous collection and processing of data – pertaining to trauma-inducing actions – in a reliable and “smart” manner for prompt identification.
It takes about 17 hours to construct a car. It takes, on average, about five hours to create a single Arc’teryx jacket, designed for the outdoors.
The time spent on each individual Arc’teryx Alpha SV jacket (expect 1,550 stitches alone to build the brand’s “bird and word” logo) includes 198 operations in 28 different work stations. And it’s all part of the promise from the Vancouver, B.C., company to build some of the most rugged outdoor gear available.
Cranking the AC or putting on and taking off additional layers of clothing isn’t always the most practical or convenient way of regulating your body temperature. Wouldn’t things be easier if you could just use smart wearable technology to solve the problem for you? A new research project developed by engineers at the University of California, San Diego, aims to help.
They have developed wearable tech which could be embedded into future clothing, thereby keeping you the perfect temperature and also saving you on the overuse of air conditioning and heating. The technology sounds similar to the pulsed Embr cooling patch originally developed by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unlike that device, however, the UC San Diego cooling and heating patch aims to be applied far more broadly to entire items of clothing — meaning that your whole wardrobe could be used for better temperature control.
Can origami protect football players and reusable rockets? Researchers have shown how the ancient art of paper-folding can soften the shock of an impact, whether it’s cracking into a helmet or touching down on a landing pad.
The technique, described today in an open-access paper published by Science Advances, takes advantage of the stress-relaxing effect of folding creases in paper and other materials.
“If you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you’d never feel that hit on your head. By the time the energy reaches you, it’s no longer pushing. It’s pulling,” senior author Jinkyu Yang, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington, said in a news release.
… By the time the unique fiber advance was unveiled last summer, members of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a not-for-profit near MIT, had already developed ways to increase the throughput and overall reliability of the process. And, staff at Inman Mills in South Carolina had established a method to weave the advanced fibers using a conventional, industrial manufacturing-scale loom to create fabrics that can use light to both broadcast and receive information.
Today, less than a year after the technology was first introduced to the world, around a quarter of a million semiconducting devices have been embedded in fibers using the patented technology, and companies like New Balance, VF, Bose, and 3M are seeking ways to use the technology in their products.
Human locomotion through natural environments requires precise coordination between the biomechanics of the bipedal gait cycle and the eye movements that gather the information needed to guide foot placement. However, little is known about how the visual and locomotor systems work together to support movement through the world. We developed a system to simultaneously record gaze and full-body kinematics during locomotion over different outdoor terrains. We found that not only do walkers tune their gaze behavior to the specific information needed to traverse paths of varying complexity but that they do so while maintaining a constant temporal look-ahead window across all terrains. This strategy allows walkers to use gaze to tailor their energetically optimal preferred gait cycle to the upcoming path in order to balance between the drive to move efficiently and the need to place the feet in stable locations. Eye movements and locomotion are intimately linked in a way that reflects the integration of energetic costs, environmental uncertainty, and momentary informational demands of the locomotor task. Thus, the relationship between gaze and gait reveals the structure of the sensorimotor decisions that support successful performance in the face of the varying demands of the natural world.
Your Lactate Threshold or LT Pace is a great training tool to use in your running to help you train your body to become a faster and more economical runner. I use LT as a gauge for athletes in several different run sessions including one of my favorites the Swing Pace Run Workout. If you don’t know your LT or haven’t had a test completed, here is an easy workout to do to calculate your LT pace. Tracking your LT allows you to access all training intensities. This is the single biggest determinant to quantify your potential training and race paces.
Schedule this workout every 3 weeks during the early season and every 4 to 6 weeks during your race season.
Should nanotechnology and gene editing be used to enhance our foods? Are these technologies safe? Would you eat bug-foods if it led to a more sustainable food supply? This is just a sampling of the questions addressed by Future Foods: How Modern Science is Transforming the Way We Eat. Author and food scientist David Julian McClements examines the complexity and magnitude of the food-related challenges our society faces today. Step by step, he explores how today’s challenges, such as malnutrition, food waste and global hunger, could be solved by tomorrow’s technology.
Future Foods illustrates the developments in food science through (nano)techonological advances – for example, fertilizer optimization to reduce the impact of pesticides on the environment while at the same time improving yields and reducing losses.
We called our trip the TransGabriel Challenge: three days, 78 miles and 18,000 feet of climbing by bike on dirt and gravel roads across L.A.’s San Gabriel Mountains. We pulled 50-pound trailers packed with tents, sleeping bags and gallon jugs of water. Loaded with more sights than we could have seen on foot in weeks, the TransGabriel was one of the most fun, challenging adventures my friend and I have ever done.
But when we told other cyclists about it, they shrugged. Riding into the empty backcountry and camping out — like backpacking with a bike? No thanks.
According to the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, approximately 334,000 people hike to the top of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks each year. This is the story of how one initiative is using letter grades to help protect and conserve the summit routes.
Every year, Americans spend more on outdoor recreation than they do on pharmaceuticals and fuel, combined, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) reports. The outdoor recreation economy generates $887 billion in annual consumer spending, 7.6 million jobs, $65.3 billion in federal tax revenue, and $59.2 billion in state and local tax revenue—and it’s still growing. Recreation is a huge part of this country, but for a lot of people, there are still barriers to participate. Often, they turn to backcountry guides as their sole way of recreating. So why is it so hard for guides and their groups to access public lands?
Two U.S. senators—Martin Heinrich (D-NM) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV)—are working on it. On Thursday, they introduced a bill that would expanding recreational access to public lands and streamline the permitting process for backcountry guides.
… Massive operations are popping up in all sorts of obscure spots, because the battery industry, for decades a relative sleeper, is now booming. Energy-data firm Wood Mackenzie predicts the value of the global battery market will reach $54 billion in 2024, more than double its level of $24.4 billion in 2017. By far the market’s largest segment is the one for automotive batteries, which Wood Mackenzie projects will reach $41 billion in 2024, up from $13 billion in 2017.
One of the world’s biggest battery-manufacturing centers is Ningde, a city in China’s Fujian Province. It’s home to Amperex Technology Limited, or ATL, a supplier of batteries for Apple’s iPhone, and to Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, or CATL, a separate company that has ballooned into one of the world’s biggest battery producers and is working with top auto makers, among them Volkswagen AG, BMW AG, and General Motors Corp.
Researchers at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) have developed a highly flexible, high-energy Textile Lithium Battery that offers more stable, durable and safe energy supply for wearable electronics with a myriad of applications, such as in healthcare monitoring, intelligent textiles, smartphones, Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and Internet of Things (IoT).