Suunto has pushed out an update today to the Suunto 9 series (Baro and non-Baro variants, plus all the colors of the rainbow) that adds in three fitness-focused features that originally premiered back on the Suunto 3 and Suunto 5 units. These three features were all from the greater collection of FirstBeat features, used by companies including both Suunto and Garmin.
In the case of these features, Suunto initially launched them on the lower end Suunto 3/5 series, but like Polar recently, they came to discover that people buying higher-end watches at 2-3x the price prefer to have all the features, versus just some of the features. Not to mention that more and more higher-end endurance sports focused watches are just as much about the daily training grind as they are about the other 22-23hrs of your life that you spend sleeping/recovery/working. So having stats to measure and monitor that is key.
… In recent months, Fitbit has been aggressively building out a health business, a division within the company known as Fitbit Health Solutions. Over a year ago, the company launched Fitbit Care, an offering aimed at employers and health plans that pay Fitbit to monitor and coach people with chronic conditions including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. Those enterprise customers can choose various plans at escalating prices, paying more to have Fitbit’s network of human coaches involved in helping people manage their conditions.
This past August, Fitbit announced that it was expanding the Fitbit Care business with a consumer offering, to be called Fitbit Premium. The company said it would charge consumers for coaching, tips, and insights mined from its devices collecting personal health data, at a cost of $10 a month or $80 a year out of pocket. That pilot has yet to launch but is expected to start later this fall, the head of Fitbit Health Solutions, Amy McDonough, told STAT this week.
… Google has clearly had an interest in the category, launching Android Wear in 2014. The company partnered with some of consumer hardware’s biggest names, including Motorola, Asus, Sony, Huawei and LG, but to little fanfare. A year ahead the release of Android Wear (now Wear OS), Apple brought its own smartwatch to market, effectively leaving the competition in the dust.
The Apple Watch would soon eclipse the rest of the wearable industry; numbers from Canalys in August 2019 show Apple at 37.9 percent of the total North American wearable band market. Fossil, the only Wear OS partner to crack the top five, is in a distant fifth, with 4.1%.
The purpose of this study was to use wearable technology data to quantify alterations in subject-specific running patterns throughout a marathon race and to determine if runners could be clustered into subgroups based on similar trends in running gait alterations throughout the marathon. Using a wearable sensor, data were collected for cadence, braking, bounce, pelvic rotation, pelvic drop, and ground contact time for 27 runners. A composite index was calculated based on the “typical” data (4-14 km) for each runner and evaluated for 14 individual 2-km sections thereafter to detect “atypical” data (ie, higher indices). A cluster analysis assigned all runners to a subgroup based on similar trends in running alterations. Results indicated that the indices became significantly higher starting at 20 to 22 km. Cluster 1 exhibited lower indices than cluster 2 throughout the marathon, and the only significant difference in characteristics between clusters was that cluster 1 had a lower age-grade performance score than cluster 2. In summary, this study presented a novel method to investigate the effects of fatigue on running biomechanics using wearable technology in a real-world setting. Recreational runners with higher age-grade performance scores had less atypical running patterns throughout the marathon compared with runners with lower age-grade performance scores.
MC10, Inc., the developer of BioStamp nPoint, an end-to-end system for physiological data collection and analytics, announced today a collaboration with the University of Vermont, a leading academic research institution. This initiative will utilize BioStamp nPoint’s biometric data captured from the lower limbs and the University of Vermont’s biomedical engineering and data science capabilities in creating methods to quantitatively track and analyze changes in gait patterns across a spectrum of disorders, including Huntington’s Disease.
“One’s ability or inability to walk has long been recognized as a key aspect of their health status. Recent advances in objective gait analysis have led to metrics such as gait speed being described as the ‘sixth vital sign’”, commented Dr. Arthur Combs, MD, MC10’s Chief Medical Officer, “In the past, evaluation of gait impairment has largely been subjective, instantaneous, and assessed in a laboratory. The use of BioStamp nPoint will allow researchers to monitor a patient’s gait continuously as they go about their daily lives enabling a better understanding of the patient’s health status.”
Digital ECG maker AliveCor is teaming up with Chinese wearable company Huami Corporation on a new effort to combine the pair’s technology into medical-grade wearables.
The end goal is to have an ECG-enabled wearable with various heart features on the market by 2020.
Mapbox, Points of interest blog, Eric Gundersen from
… On Strava, athletes can track every activity, understand where they’re pushing themselves and do a post-workout deep dive on their data. It’s not just about the run or ride — it’s about sharing how far we’re pushing, cheering on friends, and going further together. I love following all of the activity in my feed, seeing what others are doing and how they’re performing, and get excited discovering new routes and terrains around the world visualized on the map.
In designing the map, the team focused on one goal: ensuring the map accurately reflected an athlete’s journey. They designed it to be clear when an athlete powered up a steep hill, ran by the edge of a river, through a canyon, or along the beach — and wanted to give athletes a feeling of joy reflecting back on that moment they made it to the summit. They’ve made it easier to visually share the stories of our routes, terrains, and wins.
Critics of recent advances in artificial intelligence complain that although these advances have produced remarkable improvements in AI systems, these systems still do not exhibit “real”, “true”, or “genuine” understanding. The use of words like “real”, “true”, and “genuine” imply that “understanding” is binary. A system either exhibits “genuine” understanding or it does not. The difficulty with this way of thinking is that human understanding is never complete and perfect. In this article, I argue that “understanding” exists along a continuous spectrum of capabilities. Consider, for example, the concept of “water”. Most people understand many properties of water: it is wet, you can drink it, plants need it, it forms ice if chilled, and so on. But unfortunately, many people do not understand that water is an electrical conductor and, therefore, one should not use a blowdryer in the shower. Nonetheless, we do not say of those people that they lack “real”, “true”, or “genuine” understanding of “water”. Instead, we say that their understanding is incomplete.
We should adopt this same attitude toward assessing our AI systems.
Data sharing is the crux of the issue. Fitness app companies are often incentivized to share your valuable real-time health data with third parties, whether they are advertisers, law firms, or social networks like Facebook that profit from your sensitive information. If they were fully transparent about how your data was shared or how to adjust your privacy settings, users might be less likely to trust the apps. That’s why, to date, the fitness and health app industry has been dogged by scandals.
There are many valid reasons for an app to share data. It can lead to better service that the user wants. It can also be required by law for police investigations. But app makers don’t always treat the privacy of your sensitive information as a top priority.
Background: Traditional measurement systems utilized in clinical trials are limited because they are episodic and thus cannot capture the day-to-day fluctuations and longitudinal changes that frequently affect patients across different therapeutic areas. Objectives: The aim of this study was to collect and evaluate data from multiple devices, including wearable sensors, and compare them to standard lab-based instruments across multiple domains of daily tasks. Methods: Healthy volunteers aged 18–65 years were recruited for a 1-h study to collect and assess data from wearable sensors. They performed walking tasks on a gait mat while instrumented with a watch, phone, and sensor insoles as well as several speech tasks on multiple recording devices. Results: Step count and temporal gait metrics derived from a single lumbar accelerometer are highly precise; spatial gait metrics are consistently 20% shorter than gait mat measurements. The insole’s algorithm only captures about 72% of steps but does have precision in measuring temporal gait metrics. Mobile device voice recordings provide similar results to traditional recorders for average signal pitch and sufficient signal-to-noise ratio for analysis when hand-held. Lossless compression techniques are advised for signal processing. Conclusions: Gait metrics from a single lumbar accelerometer sensor are in reasonable concordance with standard measurements, with some variation between devices and across individual metrics. Finally, participants in this study were familiar with mobile devices and had high acceptance of potential future continuous wear for clinical trials. [full text]
EurekAlert! Science News, Saarland University from
It is based on a so-called laser cutter and its precise, fast cuts. These are provided by easy-to-use software developed by Daniel Gröger and Professor Jürgen Steimle for designers. Since the necessary materials are available on the market, almost any person can now produce stretchable electronics for their own purposes.
A jacket that silences incoming calls when its sleeve is plucked. A bandage that sounds an alarm when the joint is bent too much. These are two of many applications that are only possible with stretchable circuits. “However, current manufacturing processes are time-consuming and very complex,” explains Daniel Gröger, a doctoral student in computer science at Saarland University. Hence, together with Professor Jürgen Steimle, Gröger has developed a process to produce stretchable circuits within a few minutes. The heart of the process is a so-called laser cutter. Its laser beam continuously removes targeted material. In this way, it makes many precise cuts in a very short time. The researchers take advantage of this by having the laser cut a certain pattern into the material, similar to a Y shape. The size of the pattern, the thickness of its lines and the distance between the cuts determine the elasticity of the material. The material consists of a conductive and a non-conductive layer. The circuit is created by the laser ablating the conductive layer at pre-defined points during cutting.
Google’s Android OS for smartwatches, Wear OS, isn’t nearly as successful as Android for smartphones, tablets, or televisions, and there’s a lot of blame to go around for that. We can blame Google for not having enough confidence to launch its own smartwatch hardware or for barely giving Wear OS the time of day at its big developer conference, or we can blame Qualcomm for failing to design a competitive smartwatch SoC. Smartwatches from Samsung, Huawei, and Apple, with their custom operating systems and SoCs, tend to have much better battery life than smartwatches with Wear OS and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100. Qualcomm’s current wearable platforms are manufactured on a 28nm fabrication process; in comparison, Samsung’s Exynos 9110, found in the Galaxy Watch series, is manufactured on a 10nm fabrication process. Qualcomm may be bridging the gap with its next SoC for wearables, however, and it could come in the form of the Snapdragon Wear 3300.
2XU is a specialist provider of compression sportswear based in Melbourne, Australia. Initially, the company focused on compression sportswear for running and triathlon but it has since diversified its offerings to include products for other sports activities.
The company also provides team apparel and a broad range of custom apparel and accessories, which account for a significant part of its business. The company prides itself on the development of high quality and innovative compression sportswear, and it has developed a number of high performance fabrics for use in the manufacture of its products.
… In his 2005 memoir, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, claimed that his outdoor-clothing company, founded in 1973, was the first to bring the concept to the outdoors community. But the idea goes back further than that. Almost every American’s understanding of layering comes from the mid-century U.S. military.
In 1943, the Quartermaster Corps—the branch of the U.S. Army charged with procuring uniforms, among many other essential logistics of war—introduced an experimental new uniform kit, which it named the M-43. The ensemble included a woolen undershirt, a long-sleeved, flannel shirt, and a sweater. But the star of the kit was a new field jacket, which was (somewhat confusingly) also called the M-43—a nine-ounce, tightly woven cotton sateen garment, drab olive in color, sporting big pockets on the chest and at the hips.
Imagine a device that can sit outside under blazing sunlight on a clear day, and without using any power cool things down by more than 23 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius). It almost sounds like magic, but a new system designed by researchers at MIT and in Chile can do exactly that.
The device, which has no moving parts, works by a process called radiative cooling. It blocks incoming sunlight to keep from heating it up, and at the same time efficiently radiates infrared light — which is essentially heat — that passes straight out into the sky and into space, cooling the device significantly below the ambient air temperature.
Science Daily, Yokohama National University (China) from
Researchers are working to better control how the chemicals respond to treatment, as well as how to reverse the chemicals back to their original state with little to no interference. A team of researchers has achieved such results with a specific compound that can emit light and has potential applications in the next generation of smart devices such as wearable devices and anti-counterfeiting paintings.
… So what is it about soda — both regular and diet — that makes it so addictive?
According to Gary Wenk, director of neuroscience undergraduate programs at the Ohio State University and author of “Your Brain on Food,” it’s all in the beverage’s design. Your favorite brand of soft drink is engineered with just the right amount of sweetener, caffeine and carbonation to make you continuously want to grab and gulp.
Injury, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, is often an inevitable part of endurance sports. It’s an experience that most athletes will have to go through and learn how to navigate as they attempt to maintain their drive, ambition, and fitness. Once injured, the road to recovery is often longer and more arduous than planned. It’s one that requires a keen eye to what each individual’s body and mind need during this often rocky time period. However, it can be a valuable tool for longterm growth and maturity as an athlete if it’s handled properly.
A rise in the popularity of bike riding has led to an increase in more serious injuries among older cyclists who have been treated for more traumatic brain injuries and broken facial bones.
The Rutgers-led study, published in the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, found cyclists age 55 to 64 were treated at hospital emergency departments nationwide for these injuries more than 86,439 times from 2008 to 2017.
However, head and facial injuries from cycling have remained steady over the past 10 years according to lead author Corina Din-Lovinescu of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Department of Otolaryngology.
… Most noticeably, Daylight Saving can throw off sleep cycles. Your circadian rhythm is your body’s natural 24-hour cycle. A disruption in this rhythm, like Daylight Saving, is typically environmental, not genetic. Therefore, individuals can easily adjust behaviors that may cause issues, such as a poor sleep schedule. The rule of thumb is that for each hour of time change, it takes a day to adjust. So, if you get seven to eight hours of sleep and go to bed a little early the night before, you should wake feeling refreshed. However, if you already lack sleep and perhaps consume some caffeine or alcohol the night before, you might wake feeling sleep-deprived. Time to reset your internal clock!
Today, REI Co-op announces it has donated a $150,000 gift toward a long-term national study exploring the physical, mental, and emotional benefits of spending time outdoors. The study will be conducted by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“We are at a crossroads. We know through current research that the average American spends 95 percent of their time inside. At the co-op, we believe the nation’s growing disconnect from nature will only exacerbate rising rates of chronic health problems,” said Marc Berejka, president of the REI Foundation. “By supporting long-term research at Harvard, we aim to shine a light on the symbiotic relationship between health and nature. Nature is good for us, so we must be good to nature, and time outside should be part of every doctor’s toolkit.”
Late Friday afternoon, the National Park Service announced they were retracting a previous order that would have allowed ATVs and UTVs to operate on backcountry dirt roads within Utah’s national parks.
That order was based on a Utah law that allows street-legal ATVs to operate on all state roads. ATV advocacy groups argued that the law should also apply to backcountry roads in national parks that already allow passenger vehicle access. Conservation and environmental groups argued that it would be impossible to police the many dirt roads within national parks to be sure the smaller, nimble vehicles were remaining on the roads, while also citing increased the increased noise ATVs would generate in remote places.
At the urging of a controversial team of advisors, the Trump administration is mulling proposals to privatize national park campgrounds and further commercialize the parks with expanded Wi-Fi service, food trucks and even Amazon deliveries at tourist camp sites.
Leaders of the Interior Department’s “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee say these changes could make America’s national parks more attractive to a digitally minded younger generation and improve the quality of National Park Service facilities amid a huge maintenance backlog. As part of its plan, the committee calls for blacking out senior discounts at park campgrounds during peak holiday seasons.
… Natalie Levine, with the National Parks Conservation Association, said that directive left parks about a month to scramble and adopt their own rules about where e-bikes are allowed.
“There are many parks where traditional bicycles are currently only allowed on park roads. So in those situations, adding electric bicycles there might not be as a big of a concern,” Levine said.
But some parks, such as Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Acadia National Park, have more sensitive unpaved roads open to cyclists.