… “The original basis of the number was not scientifically determined,” says researcher I-Min Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
She was curious to know how many steps you need to take a day to maintain good health and live a long life, so she and her colleagues designed a study that included about 17,000 older women. Their average age was 72. The women all agreed to clip on wearable devices to track their steps as they went about their day-to-day activities.
It turns out that women who took about 4,000 steps per day got a boost in longevity, compared with women who took fewer steps. “It was sort of surprising,” Lee says. [audio, 2:14]
Activity trackers help you gather data about your movement throughout the day, thereby pushing you to reach your fitness goals and holding you accountable. Most fitness trackers on the market give you information about your heart rate, mileage, steps, elevation, length of workout and exertion level. Some provide you with reminders to get up and move every hour, and most give you a readout of texts, calls and calendar alerts on your wrist. A select few trackers provide even more information for athletes, like GPS tracking to help you find your way home during a backcountry hike, recommendations for recovery and workout plans, and the ability to sync to external apps where you can share your workouts with others. For this guide, we looked at trackers in all of the above categories, and we focused on the trackers that would be most useful for athletes and outdoor lovers.
… the Suunto 5 is simply a Suunto 9 with a smaller battery, no compass, and no barometric altimeter. Seriously, that’s it (ok, it’s got a slightly lesser waterproof spec, but still solidly waterproofed). Actually, there are technically three other tiny itty bitty tweaks – and one of them favors the cheaper unit. But more on that later.
The Suunto 5 is a mostly well priced mid-range multisport watch. Swim, bike, run, hike, even triathlon multisport option. It can track your sleep and your HR 24×7, as well as follow routes from Suunto’s platform. It most directly competes with the Polar Vantage M and Garmin Instinct or Forerunner 245 from a pricing and features perspective. Of course, all of their differences we’ll dive into.
… New innovations in wearable technologies present endless possibilities for consumer and business use cases in health, fitness, sports, and more. Devices powered by connected biosensors, software, firmware, and advanced algorithms can do many things, including enabling important new medical treatments, inform consumers about changes in their health conditions or patterns, provide real-time data-driven remedies and suggestions, and help athletes at the highest levels find new ways to improve their performance. Likewise, wearable biosensors create a wealth of new application and service opportunities for enterprises.
However, turning these opportunities into reality requires overcoming some complex challenges for quality assurance (QA) and testing – especially when it comes to ensuring the wearable technologies perform as designed in real-world use with humans. Infostretch provides Wearable Biosensor Testing services to help companies overcome these challenges and get these products to the market. We have developed a specific methodology of best practices and identified medical grade devices to help clients with healthcare, fitness and sport-based biosensors.
PLOS One; Imali T. Hettiarachchi , Samer Hanoun, Darius Nahavandi, Saeid Nahavandi from
Background
Optical measurement techniques and recent advances in wearable technology have made heart rate (HR) sensing simpler and more affordable. Objectives
The Polar OH1 is an arm worn optical heart rate monitor. The objectives of this study are two-fold; 1) to validate the OH1 optical HR sensor with the gold standard of HR measurement, electrocardiography (ECG), over a range of moderate to high intensity physical activities, 2) to validate wearing the OH1 at the temple as an alternative location to its recommended wearing location around the forearm and upper arm. Methods
Twenty-four individuals participated in a physical exercise protocol, by walking on a treadmill and riding a stationary spin bike at different speeds while the criterion measure, ECG and Polar OH1 HR were recorded simultaneously at three different body locations; forearm, upper arm and the temple. Time synchronised HR data points were compared using Bland-Altman analyses and intraclass correlation. Results
The intraclass correlation between the ECG and Polar OH1, for the aggregated data, was 0.99 and the estimated mean bias ranged 0.27–0.33 bpm for the sensor locations. The three sensors exhibited a 95% limit of agreement (LoA: forearm 5.22, -4.68 bpm; upper arm 5.15, -4.49; temple 5.22, -4.66). The mean of the ECG HR for the aggregated data was 112.15 ± 24.52 bpm. The intraclass correlation of HR values below and above this mean were 0.98 and 0.99 respectively. The reported mean bias ranged 0.38–0.47 bpm (95% LoA: forearm 6.14, -5.38 bpm; upper arm 6.07, -5.13 bpm; temple 6.09, -5.31 bpm), and 0.15–0.16 bpm (95% LoA: forearm 3.99, -3.69 bpm; upper arm 3.90, -3.58 bpm; temple 4.06, -3.76 bpm) respectively. During different exercise intensities, the intraclass correlation ranged 0.95–0.99 for the three sensor locations. During the entire protocol, the estimated mean bias was in the range -0.15–0.55 bpm, 0.01–0.53 bpm and -0.37–0.48 bpm, for the forearm, upper arm and temple locations respectively. The corresponding upper limits of 95% LoA were 3.22–7.03 bpm, 3.25–6.82 bpm and 3.18–7.04 bpm while the lower limits of 95% LoA were -6.36–(-2.35) bpm, -6.46–(-2.30) bpm and -7.42–(-2.41) bpm. Conclusion
Polar OH1 demonstrates high level of agreement with the criterion measure ECG HR, thus can be used as a valid measure of HR in lab and field settings during moderate and high intensity physical activities. [full text]
I remember clearly the day I first encountered the World Wide Web. It was 1994. It was as if a new portal to the world of information had been opened. It was fast (for the time); intuitive; and the hyperlinks to more pages of information were truly mind-boggling. It was Mosaic, the forerunner to Netscape. And it wasn’t long thereafter that putting maps on the WWW was a possibility. Web maps, in the beginning, weren’t very functional; mostly visualization tools, but still, you could see the possibility for new business models.
… The quick overview is that this feature will automatically text friends/family with specific race splits and estimated finish times when the lap button is triggered, as well as at the start/finish. Laps can be done via auto-lap of course. The idea here being that if you’ve got friends/family (aka: your peeps) following you out on the course itself, they can figure out when you’ll be done running and ready to start drinking beer.
Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate.
But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.
The finding by a team of Italian researchers is not necessarily that the crush of hashtags, likes and retweets destroys brain cells; that’s a question for neuroscientists, they said.
Rather, the economists, in a working paper published this month by the economics and finance department at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, found that Twitter not only fails to enhance intellectual attainment but substantially undermines it.
… The Leatherman Free “P2” is a multitool that is as familiar as it is different. It features the prerequisite multitool components: pliers, an assortment of screwdrivers – big and small; Phillips and Flathead. Scissors. Knife, awl, and file. But it also has magnets. Magnets? Of course it has magnets – but who would think to use them to streamline and improve the overall function of a multitool? Leave it to Leatherman, the people who invented the multitool.
… Each component is made from 100% reusable TPU – it’s spun to yarn, knitted, molded and clean-fused. Once the shoes come to the end of their first life and are returned to Adidas – they are washed, ground to pellets and melted into material for components for a new pair of shoes, with zero waste and nothing thrown away.
… To be a runner, though, there’s only one thing you need to do: Run. Still, convincing her that she was allowed to wear more running-appropriate attire was a hard sell.
That’s because showing up on the roads or trails to run does require a certain amount of self-confidence. “Confidence is life’s enabler—professionally, intellectually, athletically, socially, and even amorously,” write Katty Kay and Claire Shipman in The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance—What Women Should Know.
And sports psychology backs this up—in The Brave Athlete, Simon Marshall, PhD, and Leslie Paterson, Xterra pro racer and coach, write, “Athletes with high confidence feel less anxious, relish adversity, set higher goals, try harder, tolerate more exertional pain, feel more in control, are more optimistic and enthusiastic, and do better under pressure.”
North Carolina State University, NC State News from
Meetings in Roxanne Vogel’s office don’t last long.
It’s not that co-workers don’t want to be around the energetic 33-year-old NC State graduate, a nutrition and performance research manager at GU Energy Labs/Advanced Food Concepts in Berkeley, California.
It’s that they don’t want to pass out.
As part of her three-year training project to do something no other person has ever done — travel to Tibet, scale Mount Everest and return home to California in fewer than 14 days — Vogel worked in a closet-sized hypoxia chamber next to the company’s fitness center that simulated oxygen levels of 11,000 feet. She also slept in a bubble-like altitude tent that pumped in oxygen-reduced air, working her way over a three-month period to sleeping in oxygen levels of 20,000 feet.
… Running is a unique individual sport because it’s actually marbled with elements of teamwork. There are cross-country teams, relay squads, and track meets that are collectively scored. Many runners who are finished with their school days go on to join running groups, ranging from elite teams to local clubs. Yet you don’t need anyone else to run—some runners thrive on hammering their miles in solitude. There’s also the added complexity of competing against your own teammates in an every-runner-for-herself, starkly objective measure on the race course.
Why do we stick together, and what is the balance between sharing the work and going it alone that can help us thrive on race day?
Nearly as difficult as summiting Mount Everest for Roxanne Vogel was coordinating in a mere number of hours her trip home, a task like something out of a “Mission Impossible” movie mixed with developing-world air travel.
Vogel trained for three years for a trip that defines the term whirlwind: she’d leave home in Berkeley, Calif., climb the world’s tallest mountain and fly back to California all in 14 days.
On the 12th day, May 22, Vogel reached the peak, which left two days to get halfway around the world and back home while starting at one of the Earth’s most remote locations.
She walked through her front door around 11 p.m., May 24 — done with one hour to spare.
Written along the walls of Specialized Bicycles’ Silicon Valley-based innovation lab are the words “innovate or die.” It makes sense when you see what the company does in that building.
This hub is where the bike manufacturer’s designers and engineers dream up tomorrow’s human-powered vehicles. The team is able to both design and make prototypes in-house. This means they don’t have to send plans out to factories to build test models, which can take weeks. Instead, an engineer draws something up and can test it in the next day or so.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is about to roll out the new version of its main weather forecasting model next month — but it won’t help the agency gain much ground against its international rivals for the title of having the world’s most accurate weather model.
Why it matters: Weather forecasting today relies on numerical prediction models that simulate the current and future state of the atmosphere. If the most commonly used computer model is off target during high-impact weather events, it can affect the larger economy and possibly even cost lives.
Biometric parameters are the hidden gems found in leading biometric sensor technology that don’t get much attention, but hold a great deal of potential for next generation wearables and hearables. As background, one of the reasons PPG sensor technology has come to dominate the market for biometric sensors in wearables is that the PPG waveform can provide a broad range of insights on blood flow characteristics beyond simple heart rate measurement. This in turn enables a rich set of biometric measures, including continuous heart rate, R-R interval (heart rate variability), VO2 max, cardiac efficiency, blood pressure, and more.
But wait there’s more…the “metadata” about the PPG signal (what Valencell calls Biometric Parameters) can provide important contextual information for advanced use case development.
Basic research in biology generates fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems. It is generally impossible to predict exactly where this line of scientific inquiry might lead, but history shows that basic science almost always serves as the foundation for dramatic breakthroughs that advance human health. Indeed, many important medical advances can be traced back to basic research that, at least at the outset, had no clear link at all to human health.
One exciting example of NIH-supported basic research is the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), which began 12 years ago as a quest to use DNA sequencing to identify and characterize the diverse collection of microbes—including trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses—that live on and in the healthy human body.
The HMP researchers have subsequently been using those vast troves of fundamental data as a tool to explore how microbial communities interact with human cells to influence health and disease. Today, these explorers are reporting their latest findings in a landmark set of papers in the Nature family of journals. Among other things, these findings shed new light on the microbiome’s role in prediabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and preterm birth. The studies are part of the Integrative Human Microbiome Project .
They’re exploding in numbers and having a massive impact on our favorite trails, yet the short-shorts crowd almost never pitches in when it comes to trail work
More than 96 percent of national parks assessed in a recent report are “plagued by significant air pollution problems,” and some of California’s most iconic parks are among the most troubled, according to one of the nation’s largest nonprofit conservation associations.
The National Parks Conservation Association said in its May “Polluted Parks” report that 401 of 417 national parks that were looked at suffered from air pollution-related problems in at least one of four areas: climate change, damage to nature, visibility and air that is unhealthy to breathe.
… In sum, President Trump’s proclamation and Governor Herbert’s petition could shrink the protected publicly owned lands in Utah from 11.6 million acres to 6 million, a 48-percent reduction. Neither of these actions is popular with the public. A Public Opinion Strategies poll conducted last year found that 64 percent of Utah voters support keeping the Bears Ears National Monument at its original size . A separate, national poll found that 59 percent of the general public believes that the federal government should not exempt states from the roadless rule.