The 5 replaces the Spartan Sport in Suunto’s multisport watch collection, with better battery life (20hrs in full GPS mode), a slimmer, lighter design (67g) and more extensive features. The 5 sits between the Suunto 3 and 9 in the range.The 3 has no built-in GPS and relies on a phone app for added features, while the 9 gets a touchscreen, barometric altimeter, even more battery and a new optical sensor. Unless you’re set on elevation or want a watch for ultras, the 5 hits the sweet spot. Other features include sleep tracking, step count and calories burned, the option to program intervals, and recovery info.
One key difference between the 5 and 9 is that the 5 only pairs with Suunto’s generic sports app for syncing data and analysing workouts, whereas the 9 connects to the more in-depth Movescount. We found the app quite slow, but all the basic info is there and it’s easy to share data with third-party apps such as Strava.
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation journal from
Background
Physical activity (PA) is a component of cardiac rehabilitation (CR). However, life-long engagement in PA is required to maintain benefits gained. Wearable PA monitoring devices (WPAM) are thought to increase PA. There appear to be no reviews which investigate the effect of WPAM in cardiac populations. We firstly aimed to systematically review randomised controlled trials within the cardiac population that investigated the effect WPAM had through the maintenance phase of CR. We specifically examined the effect on cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), amount and intensity of daily PA, and sedentary time. Secondly, we aimed to collate outcome measures reported, reasons for drop out, adverse events, and psychological impact from utilising a WPAM. Methods
A systematic search (up to January 2019) of relevant databases was completed, followed by a narrative synthesis, meta-analysis and qualitative analysis. Results
Nine studies involving 1,352 participants were included. CRF was improved to a greater extent in participants using WPAM with exercise prescription or advice compared with controls (MD 1.65 mL/kg/min;95% confidence interval [CI; 0.64–2.66]; p = 0.001; I2 = 0%). There was no significant between group difference in six-minute walk test distance. In 70% of studies, step count was greater in participants using a WPAM with exercise prescription or advice, however the overall effect was not significant (SMD 0.45;95% [CI; − 0.17-1.07] p = 0.15; I2 = 81%). A sensitivity analysis resulted in significantly greater step counts in participants using a WPAM with exercise prescription or advice and reduced the heterogeneity from 81 to 0% (SMD 0.78;95% [CI;0.54–1.02]; p < 0.001; I2 = 0%). Three out of four studies reporting on intensity, found significantly increased time spent in moderate and moderate-vigorous intensity PA. No difference between groups was found for sedentary time. Three of six studies reported improved psychological benefits.
No cardiac adverse events related to physical activity were reported and 62% of non-cardiac adverse events were primarily musculoskeletal injuries. Reasons for dropping out included medical conditions, lack of motivation, loss of interest, and technical difficulties.
Conclusions
Our meta-analysis showed WPAM with exercise prescription or advice are superior to no device in improving CRF in the maintenance phase of CR and no cardiac adverse events were reported with WPAM use. Our qualitative analysis showed evidence in favour of WPAM with exercise prescription or advice for both CRF and step count. WPAM with exercise prescription or advice did not change sedentary time. Psychological health and exercise intensity may potentially be enhanced by WPAM with exercise prescription or advice, however further research would strengthen this conclusion.
… This post is written from my use cases point of view. Maybe there are other use cases which I don’t have and a totally different pictture turns out. My use cases are doing some serious running, some bycicling and most of all day to day watch.
First of all the advantages over the FR935:
Maps. I haven’t tried out all features but it’s pretty cool to have it on the watch. A use case could be finding new routes for running or bycicling, another could be sighseeing in the town or just find a bakery or supermarket during sightseeing. I don’t know if all these use cases will work (still need some time to explore) but that is super cool to have it on the wrist. On the other hand we have a smartphone with an even larger display and a more friendly UI. I would give this feature at least one plus.
Back in June Polar announced their Ignite GPS watch. This new watch undercut the higher end Vantage M on price, but yet at the same time also added a slew of features that the Vantage series doesn’t yet have (most of them are coming in November to the Vantage M/V). While the Vantage series was aimed at more hardcore athletes, the Ignite watch aimed to straddle the soft squishy middle.
No, not like your belly after forgetting to workout – but rather the mid-range price point of approximately $200-$250, and to do so with not just GPS included, but a slew of training and recovery type metrics aimed at actually making you faster/stronger/whatever, by giving you dynamically created workouts and targets based on what you were doing day by day. It’s actually more impressive once you start to dig into it, and is frankly something nobody else is doing quite this well (or even half-assed).
… If you’re one of the many people who wears a fitness band or smartwatch to count your steps, you may not be aware of one inescapable fact: they lie. Just because they tell you that you’ve reached your daily goal doesn’t mean that you actually took that many steps. The sad truth is that these devices can undercount or overcount the number of steps that you take in a day. In fact, your counts can differ widely depending on which brand you’re using.
Part of the reason is based on how they work. Today’s fitness bands use multiaxis inertial sensors called accelerometers to detect when the device is moving. Some also use gyroscopes to determine the direction and rotational movement. Because these sensors generate so much data that must be sifted through and interpreted by the device’s controller, results can often be misinterpreted and badly reported. In other words, what you see isn’t necessarily what you walked.
… Today’s watches and fitness trackers have only scratched the surface of the market. Higher-end devices will continue to add more functionality, while specialized ones will get better at performing their more limited jobs.
The growth of the wearable market will come from an increasing demand for existing devices and new form factors offering as-yet-unknown functionality. You may have a wearable at work that enhances your vision while offering a data overlay, and use another one to enhance your entertainment experience at a theme park. Both are plausible – maybe even likely – and that should help fuel the predicted growth.
As a professional basketball player in Montenegro, Nikola Mrvaljevic got the idea that there must be a better way for athletes to train. “Not everybody trains efficiently. We tend to get tired and most of the time we don’t know why,” Mrvaljevic said.
So he started Strive, a wearable technology startup that seeks to answer how and why athletes fatigue. The Bothell, Wash.-based company aims to quantify the “miles per gallon” for a given athlete.
After hanging up his basketball jersey, Mrvaljevic went on to study biomedical and electrical engineering at the University of Rhode Island. He later got an MBA from the University of Washington before co-founding Strive with Carsten Winsnes, a former NCAA crew athlete who is now the company’s COO.
Earbuds, a new startup from Austin founded by former Detroit Lions lineman Jason Fox, wants to bring the power of social media to your eardrums.
The company is one of a growing number of startups trying to rejuvenate the music streaming market by combining it with social networking so that audiences can listen to the playlists of their favorite athletes and entertainers… and their friends.
… It’s an important moment in “fitness tech.” Apple pivoted its watch toward health applications with huge success. FitBit—I’m a well-documented FitBit fanatic: Ask me about my sleep and resting heart rate next time your see me—is struggling. (FitBit was the steady hero of my 2015 feature on Jawbone, but four-plus years is an eternity in the hardware business.) And Garmin, the pride and joy of Olathe, Kansas’s technology industry, is killing it.
There are many excellent fitness tracking apps, but the best ones tend to focus on a particular type of exercise, such as running, cycling, or yoga. If you’re the kind of person who likes to workout in a variety of ways, but you want all your fitness data in one place, Google Fit is a good solution.
Here are some directions on how to sync some of the more popular apps with Google Fit, including Runkeeper, Strava, Runtastic, MapMyFitness, Mindbody, and Headspace. We’ve also included directions for syncing Life Fitness exercise equipment. These instructions cover those of you using Android phones or watches running Wear OS — we’ll have a separate guide soon for pairing with iOS’s Health app.
It’s often said we’re in the midst of a retail apocalypse — that e-commerce is driving brick-and-mortar into the ground and America is becoming a giant empty storefront. In reality, according to the U.S. Census bureau’s recent estimates, only about 10 percent of all retail sales will happen online in 2019, and our own research found that 86 percent of consumers still make half or more of their purchases in stores. Emerging generations don’t seem to be any different, with 82 percent of Millennial and Gen Z respondents reporting the same for in-store buying.
In fact, retail is undergoing a renaissance. Brands like Walmart and Restoration Hardware are making serious investments to revitalize their brick-and-mortar spaces, and previously web-only brands like Warby Parker, Glossier and Bonobos are now adding physical locations. The battle isn’t between online and brick-and-mortar; it’s between the retailers who can wow shoppers “IRL” — and the rest that aren’t making the right investments in their physical spaces.
… Choosing what to use to stay hydrated on a run is largely a matter of personal preference. Some might prefer the minimalist convenience of a handheld bottle, while others may want to go hands-free with a backpack-style vest or a belt with space to stash your phone, keys, and energy gels. Whatever you choose, though, it’s important to consider its capacity, as you’ll need more water if you’re running longer or when it’s very hot out. “Determine your fluid needs, choose the appropriate size, and then prioritize comfort,” advises running coach Jason Fitzgerald. To find the best of each kind, we asked Waterman, Fitzgerald, and six more runners what they use to stay hydrated while training.
One of the most dangerous parts of skiing or snowboarding while listening to your favorite tunes is the fact that you have absolutely no chance of hearing the outside world when you’re flying down the slopes. It’s important to be able to hear other people around you, lest you be pounded into the snow by a careening teen.
That’s where Bone Tech’s new IceBrkr goggles come in handy. Aesthetically, they look like a fairly standard pair of ski googles, but they’ve got a pretty cool trick up their sleeve: Bone conduction tech, which allows them to use the vibration of your skull to play your favorite songs.
Georgia Institute of Technology, College of Sciences from
A serendipitous discovery by a graduate student has led to materials that quickly change color from completely clear to a range of vibrant hues — and back again. The work could have applications in everything from skyscraper windows that control the amount of light and heat coming in and out of a building, to switchable camouflage and visors for military applications, and even color-changing cosmetics and clothing. It also helps fill a knowledge gap in a key area of materials science and chemistry.
Bioplastics are top of the list in a new World Economic Forum (WEF) report, Top 10 Emerging Technologies 2019, above social robots, tiny lenses for miniature devices, disordered proteins as drug targets, smarter fertilizers, collaborative telepresence, advanced food tracking and packaging, safer nuclear reactors, DNA data storage and the utility-scale storage of renewable energy.
The need for bio-based alternatives to our current plastics appears pretty obvious, with an annual 400 million tons currently produced – a figure that is expected to triple by 2050 without a global change in direction – and only 15% of it is recycled.
… The technology features liquid metal (in this case Field’s metal, an alloy of bismuth, indium and tin) trapped below its melting point in polished, oxide shells, creating particles about 10 millionths of a meter across.
When the shells are broken – with mechanical pressure or chemical dissolving – the metal inside flows and solidifies, creating a heat-free weld or, in this case, printing conductive, metallic lines and traces on all kinds of materials, everything from a concrete wall to a leaf.
That could have all kinds of applications, including sensors to measure the structural integrity of a building or the growth of crops. The technology was also tested in paper-based remote controls that read changes in electrical currents when the paper is curved. Engineers also tested the technology by making electrical contacts for solar cells and by screen printing conductive lines on gelatin, a model for soft biological tissues, including the brain.
Its crippling lethargy prematurely curtails the pursuits of countless pro and amateur triathletes. Yet despite 14% year-on-year growth in cases throughout Europe, few are aware of Lyme disease, fewer appreciate how close we may brush to the tick-borne bacteria every day, and fewer still understand how to diagnose and set a path to recovery.
“Slow the hell down.” That’s the message New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio delivered on Twitter as he announced the revival of the city’s speed camera program. The cameras went live in July with expanded hours, issuing hefty tickets to any driver who creeps above 36 miles per hour—that’s 11 mph above the city’s 25 mph posted limit—in 750 school zones throughout the city’s five boroughs.
New York City, which has been struggling to get its Vision Zero safe-streets program back on track after a 2019 surge in cyclist deaths, has also been the most prominent American city to test the idea of a “neighborhood slow zone”—a relatively infrastructure-light path to safer streets that drops speed limits to 20 mph on interior roads in residential areas. It will soon be joined by Philadelphia, where the inaugural designation of two slow-speed corridors, modeled after the New York City program, was overwhelmed with more than two dozen applications.
Like it or not, each of us is colonized by untold numbers of bacteria, viruses and other microbes. Collectively these creatures are known as the human microbiome, and there’s a growing awareness that they play important roles in many aspects of human health from nutrition and digestion to premature birth. Exactly how they do so, however, is in many cases unclear.
Now geneticist Ami Bhatt, MD, PhD, and postdoctoral scholar Hila Sberro, PhD, have discovered that our tiny passengers are churning out even tinier proteins likely to make a big impact on neighboring bacteria and human cells. The proteins, which are fewer than 50 amino acids in length, have gone unnoticed in previous studies because their minuscule size has allowed them to slip through the nets cast by previous studies of the microbiome. They published their research today in Cell.
In a time of climate change denial and vaccine resistance, scientists worry they are losing public trust. But it’s just the opposite, a survey released Friday finds.
Public trust of scientists is growing. It’s on a par with our trust of the military and far above trust of clergy, politicians and journalists.
The survey by the Pew Research Center finds 86% of those surveyed say they have a fair amount or a great deal of faith that scientists act in our best interests. And that’s been trending higher — it was 76% in 2016.
[Robert] Chang thinks he might soon have a workaround to the data problem: patients. He’s working with Dawn Song, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, to create a secure way for patients to share their data with researchers. It relies on a cloud computing network from Oasis Labs, founded by Song, and is designed so that researchers never see the data, even when it’s used to train AI. To encourage patients to participate, they’ll get paid when their data is used.
… At social media hotspots such as the Grand Prismatic thermal pool, visitors in search of a better shot created an illegally-blazed trail that the park was forced to close due to the erosion it caused before later codifying it as an official trail. Franks notes this is not new – nor exclusive to social media – as this is how the first boardwalk routes were created fifty or sixty years ago, following footpaths around the pools. The lesson: people will go wherever they want unless you tell them where they are allowed and where they aren’t.
Another problem, which I explored in an earlier story, is “geotagging” which involves revealing exactly where a photograph was taken based upon its easily retrieved Global Positioning System coordinates that are attached to most images taken with digital cameras.
In attempts to limit the creation of further trails and their related damage, and byfollowing the same standards that led the Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board to initiate their “Tag Responsibly” campaign, Frank himself does not tag specific locations when posting photos on the park’s social media.
If fewer of the destinations within Yellowstone were roadside attractions, he believes the park would have a more formal policy on geotagging. Glacier National Park, he added, encourages visitors to not geotag backcountry sites.
Southeastern Utah is known for its rock climbing, river rafting, hiking and camping, as well as cultural resources for Native American tribes with thousands of archaeological sites. The Bears Ears area—named for two tall buttes that resemble a bear’s head peeking over a ridge—is also a wonderland of buried fossils of dinosaurs, giant sloths, and other ancient extinct species, including many areas that remain to be excavated.
For more than two years, the Bears Ears National Monument has been a central point of contention over the Trump administration’s management of public lands and the recreationists, environmentalists and Native American tribes opposed to it.
The latest development is a dispute over a proposed Bears Ears monument management plan—released July 26, after the government spent $2.35 million preparing it—which comes as lawsuits continue challenging the president’s authority to drastically reduce national monuments created by his predecessors under the 1906 Antiquities Act.
Tesla watchers know that Jeff Dahn and his team at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are world leaders in lithium-ion battery research. For years, Dahn worked exclusively for 3M, but when that arrangement ended, Tesla swooped in and signed a contract for Dahn to work for the Silicon Valley car/tech/energy company. … Research published by Dahn and his team in the journal Nature Energy on July 15 reveals they have created new lithium-ion pouch cells that may outperform solid-state technology battery.
Solar thermophotovoltaic (STPV) cells are a technology for generating electricity from sunlight. A typical solar panel is made using photovoltaic cells, which generate energy directly from the photons in sunlight. STPV heat engines, in contrast, focus the full spectrum of sunlight onto an absorber. That heats up, and transfers thermal energy to an emitter. The emitter, in turn, outputs a photons in a much narrower light spectrum. That spectrum is optimized for the TPV cell to generate electricity more efficiently. But that efficiency has still been stalled at 23 percent for many years. Now, researchers from UC Berkeley may be able to push that up to a whopping 50 percent efficiency.