Smartwatches try to get us away from our smartphone screens, but ironically, a smartwatch’s screen is one of the most important things about it. While plenty of materials have been used in smartwatch displays (including E-Ink, RIP Pebble), OLED and AMOLED panels have become ubiquitous on high-end wearables.
But Garmin, maker of some of the most comprehensive fitness wearables available, hasn’t taken advantage of such screen technology until now.
Fitbit is teaming up with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer to help bring atrial fibrillation detection capabilities to its line of wearable fitness trackers as part of a larger campaign toward earlier diagnoses among those at higher risk of heart disease and stroke.
Working with a joint venture established by BMS and Pfizer—an alliance that focuses on cardiovascular disease and stroke through nonprofits and collaborations—Fitbit also plans to help develop educational content and guidance regarding afib, alongside FDA-approved arrhythmia detection software.
Yes, for real: The Garmin Swim is back, baby. Over 7 years later and Garmin has finally incremented to the second edition in their swimmers-only watch. And, it’s basically exactly what you’d expect in a swimming first watch from Garmin in 2019. Unlike the previous edition, this one now supports openwater swimming with GPS, while also recording/displaying your heart rate in real-time via the optical HR sensor on the back. It has all the activity/sleep/stress/life tracking stuff you’ll find in any other Garmin watch. And it can even track your run, ride, or gym workout.
But more than that – it’s actually got new swim-specific features not seen on any other Garmin device to date.
Electronics juggernaut Sony is planning to launch a B2B device platform early next year that will help digital health companies incorporate a straightforward wearable sensor into their existing remote monitoring services.
The mSafety platform — which Sony is previewing today at the Connected Health Conference in Boston — doesn’t look to focus on the apps, color displays or other features that drive tech-savvy users to Apple Watches, Fitbits or other leading consumer smartwatches, Anders Stromberg, head of the wearable platform department in Sony’s European Network Communications group, told MobiHealthNews.
Rather, it wants to deliver an accessible user interface, a secure backend and as few headaches as possible for clients looking to maintain their devices over the long term.
The use of consumer based health and wellness trackers such as smart watches or smart clothing has the potential to increase physical activity participation. Many of these devices noninvasively track vital health signs by optical detection. However, this technology is limited by the need for rigid materials. To overcome this, Emre Polat et al. have developed a new class of flexible and transparent wearables based on graphene sensitized with semiconducting quantum dots.
The new technology can successfully measure heart rate and oxygen saturation. It also has the potential to measure blood pressure and cardiac output, whilst maintaining its flexible and transparent form. The group has used the approach to develop a plethora of prototype fitness trackers such as a heart-rate monitoring bracelet and a wireless ultraviolet (UV) monitoring patch, which informs the user of their current UV exposure and recommended remaining exposure time via a mobile phone app.
Fathom AI, a leader in sports injury prevention through technology, today announced plans to release its 3-sensor wearable for endurance athletes of all abilities on October 1, 2019. These wearable sensors are first of their kind, and pair with Fathom’s proprietary app, using artificial intelligence and the athlete’s biodata to build a customized training prep and recovery routine to prevent sports injury associated with repetitive use.
“At Fathom, we’ve meticulously synthesized decades of human movement research and clinical best practices and paired it with cutting edge sensors and machine intelligence to really move the needle for users’ athletic resilience,” says Fathom AI founder Ivonna Dumayan. “Many people don’t realize that the most effective injury prevention may start with just 10 or 15 minutes daily of data- driven prep and recovery to keep small things from becoming serious injuries.”
BJSM blog, Geoffrey T. Burns and Nicholas Tam from
… The combined advantages of these individual design features are difficult to separate. The midsole foam provides both superior energy return and reduced mass. Is the material structurally feasible on its own, or is the plate necessary to stabilize it? Is the benefit from the plate augmented by the angle it extends through the shoe and therefore only afforded by its thicker midsole? These components are interacting in concert, rendering it difficult to disentangle their advantages.
Thus, selecting parameters for shoe regulation would be troublesome up front and operationally burdensome over time for the IAAF. It would perpetuate technology debates and give rise to myriad convoluted standards rife with historical contradictions. Running shoes are inevitably a blend of materials: midsole foams of different densities, rubber outsoles of varying configurations, and rigid pieces embedded in distinct architectures. Attempts to implement comprehensive rules covering every facet of a shoe’s design is a band-aid approach that is not feasible.
Patagonia has always been one of the leaders in the apparel industry when it comes to sustainability and environmental activism. In their latest move to reach their goal to be completely carbon neutral by 2025, every single waterproof shell in their line is now made with recycled materials and sewn in Fair Trade Certified Factories. That includes everything from technical alpine & snowsports shells to even their kids’ rain jackets.
Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have developed a metamaterial that’s strong but supercompressible at the same time. Or rather: they had computers do it. Using machine learning, two different designs were made, one on a macro-scale for maximum compressibility and one on a micro-scale imparting strength and stiffness. Applied together on a brittle polymer, they transform into a lightweight, recoverable and supercompressible material.
You may not realize that among more conventional applications of artificial intelligence like apps and search engines, emerging technologies are transforming yet another unexpected area of design: materials. A fascinating new material study released by Delft University is showing how machine learning may upend our assumptions of how materials are capable of behaving.
Producing functional fabrics that perform all the functions we want, while retaining the characteristics of fabric we’re accustomed to is no easy task.
Two groups of researchers at Drexel University — one, who is leading the development of industrial functional fabric production techniques, and the other, a pioneer in the study and application of one of the strongest, most electrically conductive super materials in use today — believe they have a solution.
They’ve improved a basic element of textiles: yarn. By adding technical capabilities to the fibers that give textiles their character, fit and feel, the team has shown that it can knit new functionality into fabrics without limiting their wearability.
Do you live in a neighbourhood that has a roaming group of children that plays outside with little or no interference from adults? One where the local kids knock on your door to ask your child to come out to play?
Kudos if you do. Children are more physically active when they spend time outside. They develop a sense of place and belonging when they’re allowed to explore their neighbourhood. Nature connection is also only possible outside and it’s as simple as watching bees in the garden or following ants on the sidewalk.
Training & Conditioning magazine, Dennis Read from
… Here are common myths surrounding exertional heat illness in athletes and ways to counteract these misconceptions.
Myth No. 1: You can’t suffer heat illness if you’re properly hydrated.
Thanks to ongoing education and reminders, athletes generally get the message about the importance of hydration. But some athletes may take it too far, assuming that as long as they’ve been fueling themselves well and drinking enough fluids, they have nothing to worry about when training in the heat.
In this talk, David Wallace discusses the background of his book “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming”, how to talk about this subject without spiraling into despair, and what role technology may be able to play for both mitigation and adaptation solutions.
When you ride down this bike path in a woods in rural Belgium, the path gradually rises in the air—and at its highest point, around 32 feet above the ground, propels you through the canopy of pine trees. The path, called Cycling through the Trees, is one of a handful of breathtakingly unique experiences that the Belgian government has created to draw people to the countryside and get them on bikes.
In the months after the accident, Thompson embarked on a frustrating online search for a bicycle built for heavy riders. He sought a high-end road bike that could withstand his bodyweight, and still allow him to pedal great distances over hilly and mountainous terrain. What Thompson found were heavy riders like him, who gathered on online forums to complain about the lack of such a bicycle.
“I found a sea of individuals all having the same problem,” Thompson said. “They were saying, ‘I used to be an athlete and now I’m way overweight. I want to start riding but I can’t find a bicycle that’s right for me.’”
The growth of wearable medical devices is not likely to slow any time soon, but many users are uncomfortable about becoming dependent on the devices due to concern over inaccurate health measurements or malfunctions, according to a survey on The Manifest, a business news and how-to site.
The survey found that more than one-third of people (38%) believe tracking exercise is the primary benefit of investing in a wearable, but a significant number are concerned about inaccurate health measurements or malfunctions. More specifically, 36% of the 581 people surveyed worry that their wearable could give wrong measurements about their heart rate and vital signs; 18% are concerned their device could malfunction; and 14% worry about becoming over-reliant on their wearable.
The way that you think about your body matters. Research from our lab at Maastricht University has shown that thinking about what your body can do – rather than how it looks – can help you to feel more positively about your body. In a recent collaboration between our lab and researchers from the University of Gothenburg, we took a closer look at why this is the case.
SportRXiv Preprints; Darias Holgado, Esther Troya, José C. Perales, Miguel Vadillo, Daniel Sanabria from
Objective: to replicate the hypothesis that mental fatigue impairs physical performance.
Design: a pre-registered (https://osf.io/wqkap/), randomized, within-subject experiment. Methods: 30 physically active sports people completed a time-to-exhaustion test (TTE) at 80% VO2max in two separate sessions, after completing a mental fatigue task or watching a documentary for 90 min. We measured power output, heart rate, RPE and subjective mental fatigue state. Results: Bayes factor analyses showed moderate-to-strong evidence for the null hypothesis (i.e., no evidence of reduced performance) for average time in TTE (BF+0 = 0.102) and anecdotal evidence for the null hypothesis in RPE (BF+0 = 0.345) and heart rate (BF+0 = 0.387), although the Bayes factor analyses revealed extreme evidence supporting the alternative hypothesis that the mental fatigue task was more mentally fatiguing than the control task, BF+0 = 116.69 Conclusions: our data seem to challenge the idea that mental fatigue has a negative influence on exercise performance. Although we did succeed at manipulating subjective fatigue, this did not impair physical performance. However, we cannot discard the possibility that mental fatigue may have a negative influence under different conditions, e.g., in the long term. Our replication study opens interesting avenues for future studies in this field with more rigorous methodological practices, such as a priori power calculation, data sharing or pre-registration
… Access to endowment land in Idaho is important to us as Idahoans, and so long as revenue-generating activities are respected and not impacted, these lands will remain open for public access and recreation. As the director of the Idaho Department of Lands, I am asking you to do your part to protect endowment lands while enjoying them. Working together, we can continue to enjoy hunting and other activities, while also supporting our school children by being good stewards of these lands.
Part 1 in “The Mosaic Series”: Can “collaboration as usual” save America’s most iconic ecosystem or is it time for new leaders and a braver new vision?
World Economic Forum, Formative Content, Kate Whiting from
… Silviculture – the practice of sustainable forestry – is a vital part of the German economy, accounting for around 1.3 million jobs and an annual turnover of around $184 billion.
“More than 100 million solid cubic metres of damaged wood are causing a drastic fall in prices on the timber market – which is why many forestry companies are facing the end,” says Albert Stegemann, the chairman of the working group on nutrition and agriculture of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group.
… “With the coalition, we want to raise awareness of the potential for hydrogen and fuel cells — to provide energy resilience and security, reduce emissions and foster economic growth — so we can enable their adoption in the Midwest region,” said Ted Krause, Argonne’s fuel cell laboratory program manager and a department head with Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division.
… the new battery would have “twice the energy density as previous versions, is made of abundant materials, and could lead to reduced production costs and environmental impact.”
While previous aluminum-ion battery concepts used graphite as a cathode, which provides low energy production, the team replaced it with an organic, nanostructured cathode, made of the carbon-based molecule anthraquinone.
“The material costs and environmental impacts that we envisage from our new concept are much lower than what we see today, making them feasible for large scale usage, such as solar cell parks, or storage of wind energy, for example,” says Patrik Johansson, Professor at the Department of Physics at Chalmers.
… Even as overall energy consumption has risen in practically every country over the last three decades, energy use per capita has not. In fact, in the United States and some other advanced economies per capita energy consumption has been falling (or flat) since the early 1980s. This could, of course, be put down to increasing energy efficiency. And, that is certainly part of the story.
But another part might simply be less energy available per person. The question arises, of course, of whether this is a worldwide phenomenon. Is population growing faster than energy supplies?