Shipments of wrist-worn wearables, inclusive of smartwatches, basic watches, and wrist bands, reached 34.2 million units, up 28.8% year over year during the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19), according to new data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker. The top 5 companies – Xiaomi, Apple, Huawei, Fitbit, and Samsung – continued to push forward with new products and promotional campaigns during the quarter, collectively capturing 65.7% of the market, an almost 12-point gain from last year.
“Health is now at the forefront for these devices since companies have started providing actionable insights and prescriptive measures for end users,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC Mobile Device Trackers. “Beyond health, mobile payment is also starting to become a mainstay as roughly two out of five wrist-worn wearables now include NFC, and many more simply use QR codes to complete transactions.”
… I must admit: I’m the queen of taking on one million projects, working late and getting up early for arduous exercise, but then burning out and wondering what went wrong. However, I kid you not when I say that the Polar Ignite has taught me something seriously valuable.
The morning after I had completed a half-marathon and enjoyed a late dinner with friends, I felt low. My calves hurt, my eyes were heavy and my motivation to train was almost non-existent.
I’d slept with my Polar Ignite over a couple of weeks by this point and was addicted to the Nightly Recharge feature that tells you how deep your sleep is and the number of interruptions you experience through the night. That day my Ignite told me loud and clear I was in the red ‘Compromised’ zone.
Today Garmin announced the new Vivoactive 4 & 4S watches, within a pile of different color/material variants. The difference between the 4 & 4S is simply the size. They also announced the new AMOLED display Venu watch, which I cover in a different post. Ultimately though the Vivoactive 4 and Venu watches are *identical* in features and functionality. You could hold the two watches side by side and go through every button press the exact same way and achieve the same results. The only difference being the extra live watch faces on Venu (and of course, it’s a much prettier display that you pay for in battery life).
But this post is about the Vivoactive 4, not Venu. The VA4 takes the Vivoactive 3 of yesteryear and advanced it forward with a pile of new features, as well as including music as the baseline. Previously music was in a separate edition (the Vivoactive 3 Music), but now it’s part of both the VA4 and VA4S watches. Within both there’s the slate of new features primarily related to other workout types like yoga & Pilates with animated step by step workout move instructions, 24×7 respiration rate tracking, estimated sweat loss and finally hydration tracking. Plus the bringing in bits like PulseOx and the new Sony GPS chipset from other watches.
… With the latest iteration of the Strap, Whoop brings new improvements including a Strain Coach to help you train smarter according to your recovery level and goal. You can now also overlay your performance metrics over videos you record in the Whoop app. Battery life has also been improved to up to a rated five days from three on the Whoop Strap 2.0. … We were fans of the last generation Strap, so do the latest improvements make it a great wearable option for training like a pro? I’ve been living with the Whoop Strap 3.0 for over a month to find out. Here’s my comprehensive verdict.
Apple Watch Series 5 highlights how Apple is plotting to push heavily into healthcare applications and leverage its enterprise momentum.
At the company’s iPhone launch event, Apple CEO Tim Cook ran a video showing a bevy of Apple Watch customers who used the device to get ahead of heart conditions, dial 911, and get life-saving alerts. The Apple Watch starts at $399 for Series 5 with GPS and $499 for the cellular version. Apple is keeping the Series 3 at $199, a price that should get Apple Watch more converts.
The stories are legit — we have one of our own at ZDNet — and the not so subliminal message is clear: Apple Watch is your health and wellness companion. “Hearing these stories really makes my heart sing,” said Cook.
The Garmin Fenix 6 series watches look like the earlier 5-Plus series but in reality represent a revamped piece of hardware that has also taken notable steps forward in the features it offers and the hardware case it comes in. The true ‘outdoors’ and ‘sport’ features have been improved a little but the most noteworthy features include larger screens, solar charging in the 6x and suprisingly better battery life. Everything from the earlier 5-Plus series is now standard on Pro models and above like PulseOx, Garmin PAY, Music and Maps.
For once, it REALLY is a case that THE BEST has got better.
… It’s hard to see where the next big thing will come from. Galvanic Skin Response, which measures how well our skin conducts electricity the more we sweat as a response to triggers, judges skin hydration. But the only device to try to use it in a smartwatch was HealBe’s much-derided food-tracking device. If you wanted to do more in-depth blood analysis, you’d need to break the skin, a hard sell for customers (aside from diabetics) and a legal minefield for manufacturers.
Without new, and compelling, ways of looking after our bodies, there’s little reason to spend another $400 on a timepiece.
Swim practice may be getting a little techier, as a new pair of augmented reality-enabled goggles promises to keep track of swimmers’ heart rates and performance. Officially launching in November, the technology was born from a partnership between Canadian company Form, which specializes in tech supported goggles, and Finnish-based company Polar, which works on sports technology including heart rate monitoring.
The new technology uses Form’s swim googles and Polar’s optical heart rate monitors. Users will have to purchase both in order for these tracking capabilities to work.
Wearable health and wellness trackers based on optical detection are promising candidates for public health uses due to their noninvasive tracking of vital health signs. However, so far, the use of rigid technologies hindered the ultimate performance and form factor of the wearable. Here, we demonstrate a new class of flexible and transparent wearables based on graphene sensitized with semiconducting quantum dots (GQD). We show several prototype wearable devices that are able to monitor vital health signs noninvasively, including heart rate, arterial oxygen saturation (SpO2), and respiratory rate. Operation with ambient light is demonstrated, offering low-power consumption. Moreover, using heterogeneous integration of a flexible ultraviolet (UV)–sensitive photodetector with a near-field communication circuit board allows wireless communication and power transfer between the photodetectors and a smartphone, offering battery-free operation. This technology paves the way toward seamlessly integrated wearables, and empowers the user through wireless probing of the UV index.
… In recent years, a number of top sportswomen have talked about the impact of their menstrual cycle on their training and performance.
British tennis player, Heather Watson attributed her first round loss at the 2015 Australian Open to period symptoms, including dizziness and nausea, while British Olympic athlete Eilish McColgan believes her period contributed to a hamstring injury last year.
Research from 2016 shows that more than half of elite female athletes say that hormonal fluctuations during their menstrual cycle hampered their training and performances.
With native heart-rate monitoring and movement analysis, the Apple Watch is an ideal fit for your health and fitness routine — whether you are a hardcore exercise fanatic or just getting started. Tracking your exercises and meeting your goals is a great way to preserve and enhance your physical and mental health, and the Apple Watch stands ready to assist in a number of ways. Start by downloading a few of the best fitness apps for the Apple Watch. We’ve rounded up a selection of our favorites, so you can spend less time perusing the App Store and more time hitting the treadmill — or browsing our roundup of the best Apple Watch apps.
Last week Garmin ever so quietly added so-called ‘Connected GPS’ functionality to the Garmin Connect Mobile application, while concurrently releasing a firmware update for the Vivosmart 4 (which came a year ago), as well as incorporating it into the base Vivomove 3 announced last Thursday. The functionality essentially gives these wearables GPS, as they don’t have GPS chipsets inside already. This functionality follows with what Fitbit added many years ago for their GPS-less wearables, under the ‘Connected GPS’ name as well.
This allows you to not only record a GPS track leveraging your phone’s GPS capabilities, but also get/see speed and distance on your wearable, despite not having any sensors or GPS in the unit itself.
The accelerometer created by KTH researchers could be used in mobile phones for navigation, mobile games and pedometers, as well as monitoring systems for heart disease and motion-capture wearables that can monitor even the slightest movements of the human body
Researchers have found a way to use polymer printing to stretch and flatten twisted molecules so that they conduct electricity better. A team led by chemical and biomolecular engineers from the University of Illinois report their findings in the journal Science Advances.
Conjugated polymers are formed by the union of electron-rich molecules along a backbone of alternating single and double chemical bonds. The conjunction allows electricity to travel very quickly through a polymer, making it highly desirable for use in electrical and optical applications. This mode of transporting charges works so well that conjugated polymers are now poised to compete with silicon materials, the researchers said.
However, these polymers tend to contort into twisted spirals when they join, severely impeding charge transport.
“The flatness or planarity of a conjugated polymer plays a large role in its ability to conduct electricity,” said chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Ying Diao, who led the study. “Even a slight twist of the backbone can substantially hinder the ability of the electrons to delocalize and flow.”
If smartphones can fit a whole world of functionality within our pockets, why can’t the same features be incorporated into useful tools for people with disabilities? In a particularly cool example of accessible technology, the WeWALK Smart Cane does just that. Created by engineer Kursat Ceylan of the Young Guru Academy (YGA) in Turkey, who’s visually impaired, the device is integrated with a voice assistant and Google Maps, and features ultrasonic sensors that detect obstacles above chest level.
… Honnold’s latest goal is to improve his speed on sport climbs and to boost his finger strength. The former is a departure from his patient and methodical soloing style, an attempt to become a more well-rounded climber. The latter seems ludicrous to anyone who watched Free Solo and saw his life hanging by a chalked-up knuckle. His fingers, like his body, assert power, gangly but so muscular as to be swollen. You expect his fingers to be worn and callused, like a guitarist’s, but he keeps them moisturized to be sensitive enough to feel tiny variations in rock, as if reading Braille. He’s never considered himself a great athlete — or even an athlete, for most of his life. He likes football — his team is the 49ers — but was “too contrarian” for team sports growing up. He hates running, hates aimless hiking with huge backpacks and has barely lifted weights. He might have made a decent competitive swimmer, he thinks, only because he hates water so much that he’d hustle to get out of it. But he saw power and potential in the hidden architecture of a rock. It spoke not only to his loner tendencies but to his pathological need to be great at something he could control. “I love the feeling of improvement,” he says. “It’s the excitement of newness, even though it’s not, you know, impressive.”
… The challenge for your brain is similar to what you’re faced with when trying to engage in conversation at a noisy cocktail party. You’re able to focus on the person you’re talking to and “mute” the other discussions. This phenomenon is selective hearing – what’s called the cocktail party effect.
When everyone at a large, crowded party talks at roughly the same loudness, the average sound level of the person you’re speaking with is about equal to the average level of all the other partygoers’ chatter combined. If it were a satellite TV system, this roughly equal balance of desired signal and background noise would result in poor reception. Nevertheless, this balance is good enough to let you understand conversation at a bustling party.
How does the human brain do it, distinguishing among billio
In late 2016, my friends and I planned a trip to East Timor, an island nation in the heart of Asia’s Coral Triangle. The specific reef area we wanted to explore did not have a scuba dive center nearby. To see what existed beyond the ocean’s surface in this part of the world, we’d need to learn to freedive.
Freediving is an advanced variation of snorkeling, where each dive is completed with only the air inside of your lungs. The best freedivers in the world can go deeper than 300 feet and hold their breath for over eight minutes at a time. For perspective, Elizabeth Tower—home to Big Ben in the UK—is 314 feet tall.
In the era of Big Data, we’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behavior is predictable. But number crunching can lead us perilously wrong.
REI Co-op Journal, Uncommon Path magazine, Leslie Nemo from
Old and famous city parks are good fakes. If you wander deep enough and keep your gaze below the treetops, the wide lawns and leafy forests let you imagine that you’re traveling through bucolic countryside. That’s the idea—an illusion of country in the city.
But the newest urban retreats are taking a different approach. “How do you take something that’s already built and has so much infrastructure around it and use that in the next phase of what a city wants?” says Nick Wesley, who is developing one such park in Chicago.
TheHill, Opinion; Sandra Marra, Mary Ellen Sprenkel, Land Tawney, Kate Van Waes and Jessica Wahl from
… over 191,000 miles of trails, 81,000 buildings, 100,000 structures, and 470,000 miles of roads will need maintenance and repair or face the risk of no longer being accessible to the public. More than $1.3 billion of the NPS and USFS backlog is in recreation assets such as campgrounds, trails and marinas. This not only hurts the outdoor recreation industry – which accounts for 2.2 percent of the American economy and directly supports 4.5 million jobs – but also the gateway and rural communities that rely on those recreation activities to survive, as well as other sectors that utilize recreation on public lands as recruitment and retention strategies.
Fortunately, in a time of increasingly partisan battles and political stalemates, outdoor recreation and the protection of our national treasures is something around which everyone can rally.
Three of the world’s top ultra runners explored the border between the United States and Mexico and met the people who call it home. Mike Foote, Mario Mendoza and Mauricio Carvajal teamed up to make a journey across North America, stopping in Big Bend National Park, Tijuana and select destinations in between. Along the way they met cattle ranchers, members of Tohono O’odham Nation and runners from across two nations.