UNICEF, the United Nations agency devoted to delivering aid to kids around the world, now makes a fitness tracker for American children. Called the “Kid Power Band,” the smart bracelet petitions kids to get active with an unconventional incentive: If they complete enough steps in one day, UNICEF will deliver a food packet to a hungry child in need. “The more kids move with the Kid Power Band, the more lives they save!” the product page declares.
Apparently it needs to be said: Compelling children to exercise by holding the lives of other kids over their heads is magnificently problematic. Children shouldn’t be held responsible for the lives of other children. But it’s also problematic for another, less obvious reason: A punitive or even rewards-based system to encourage young people to move more won’t be effective in the mid or long term, and could cause or worsen obsessive thoughts and behaviors in some kids.
Which is to say, while a Fitbit or other fitness tracker is a tempting stocking stuffer for your kid, save your money or spend it on a better activity-focused gift.
It’s been two months since the Apple Watch Series 5 came out, and the watch has been on my right wrist every one of those days. Swim, bike, run…and plenty more. You may remember my initial thoughts on it back in September after the first few days worth of workouts. Did things get better? And is it actually a better watch than Series 4 for sport and fitness? Back in September, the answer was a definite no. But with a pile of updates later, I kept on using it hoping that future firmware upgrades would resolve the issues I saw.
There are numerous things to dislike about going to the doctor: Paying a copay, sitting in the waiting room, out-of-date magazines, sick people coughing without covering their mouths. For many, though, the worst thing about a doctor’s visit is getting stuck with a needle. Blood tests are a tried-and-true way of evaluating what is going on with your body, but the discomfort is unavoidable. Or maybe not, say Caltech scientists.
In a new paper published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering, describe a mass-producible wearable sensor that can monitor levels of metabolites and nutrients in a person’s blood by analyzing their sweat. Previously developed sweat sensors mostly target compounds that appear in high concentrations, such as electrolytes, glucose, and lactate. Gao’s sweat sensor is more sensitive than current devices and can detect sweat compounds of much lower concentrations, in addition to being easier to manufacture, the researchers say.
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), News from
Imagine a handheld electronic gadget that can soften and deform when attached to our skin. This will be the future of electronics we all dreamed of. A research team at KAIST says their new platform called ‘Transformative Electronics Systems’ will open a new class of electronics, allowing reconfigurable electronic interfaces to be optimized for a variety of applications.
A team working under Professor Jae-Woong Jeong from the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST has invented a multifunctional electronic platform that can mechanically transform its shape, flexibility, and stretchability. This platform, which was reported in Science Advances, allows users to seamlessly and precisely tune its stiffness and shape.
“This new class of electronics will not only offer robust, convenient interfaces for use in both tabletop or handheld setups, but also allow seamless integration with the skin when applied onto our bodies,” said Professor Jeong.
… from fitness trackers to smart watches, devices designed to help us live happier, healthier lives still rely on data that is biased towards men. And it’s not a new issue.
Treadmills, for example, often use calorie counters skewed towards men’s weight, while fitness trackers can be wildly inaccurate because a woman’s resting heart beat changes throughout her menstrual cycle. No recognition of this may push women to over-exert themselves in an attempt to correct it.
This bad data can give women a warped view of reality: technology is trying to tell them how they are performing but the results are wildly inaccurate because it assumes they are men.
Garmin is fleshing out the sleep health potential of its wearables thanks to a newly-announced collaboration with Sleeprate.
Now, the Israeli app maker will be able to access the Garmin Health Companion SDK for a more fleshed out look at device wearers’ sleep and activity data, and will use these to offer improved tracking and personalized insights for those interested in how workouts and nightly sleep affect one another.
… Around 2016, I began to notice that friends were passing around listings from Hipcamp, a platform for campsite booking. People shared the listings with some suspicion: life in the Bay Area encourages a wariness of V.C.-subsidized services, and the campsites in question were all hosted on private, not public, land—a vague affront to the more hardcore among us. Still, the Hipcamp Web site was clean and cheerful, with a millennial-friendly user-experience flow reminiscent of Airbnb’s. Filters selected for swimming holes and rest rooms; aspirational, high-res photographs featured serape blankets and speckled tin mugs. For the neurotic planner who likes to know what she’s getting into, Hipcamp was reassuring. Most important, it had nothing but open sites in areas where even minimally desirable public campgrounds were booked solid for months.
Camping, on Hipcamp, is loosely defined. The company’s mission is simple—“Get more people outside”—and its marketing tends to take a gentle, inclusive tone.
Oregon Public Broadcasting, OPB News, Emily Cureton from
… [Geoff] Babb is recovering from two strokes with the help of his wife, Yvonne, family, and many friends.
“My stroke affected my whole body. It’s called quadriparesis, or weakness in all four limbs,” he explained.
Even though stroke is the leading cause of serious disability in the nation, he found existing all-terrain wheelchairs didn’t suit his needs — some are too frail, others require upper body strength, and motorized options aren’t allowed on many trails.
Babb began envisioning a new design to help himself and other outdoor enthusiasts with serious disabilities. [audio, 4:15]
Boston sneaker giant New Balance is sprinting into the future, using 3D printing to make portions of the sneaker soles in some of its newest models.
New Balance has partnered with Somerville-based 3D printing technology developer Formlabs to create the Rebound Resin which is being used to print components. [video, 5:36]
How to carry clothes and maybe a lunch? A traditional backpack jumps up and down too much and I think that will eventually hurt my back.
In the bigger picture, I would like this to replace some or all of my current training. I typically run halfs and fulls although I’m not training for anything atm. This means every week day will be a double run day, although for modest mileage. I’ve never run doubles before nor really know how to incorporate this into training. Like if I have a fast day, should I do that in the morning or evening? If I need to add mileage, should I run longer in the morning or evening? That type of thing.
Two-dimensional materials — those either only an atom or layer thick — display a number of interesting properties and could form the foundation for a range of new devices. One of these materials, molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), has shown an unusual flexibility that could make it attractive as a semiconducting component of bendable electronics.
In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Temple University, scientists have discovered an intriguing new behavior in MoS2 at the atomic level as it is stretched and strained, like it would be in an actual flexible device.
After straining a film of the material grown on graphite, the researchers noticed that the formerly two-dimensional sheet of MoS2 would slip, relaxing the strain. This, in turn, formed a rippled pattern at a larger scale that translated into an altered electronic structure within the individual atoms.
Arris Composites, the pioneering manufacturer of next-gen composites for mass market products, today announced the strategic hire of Simon Lancaster as Head of Consumer Products. Lancaster will lead the team developing the next generation of consumer products for leading brands that will be manufactured with Arris Composites’ patent-pending Additive Molding™ Systems.
Prior to joining Arris, Lancaster spent the past 11 years at Apple, culminating in his role as Advanced Materials Lead and Product Design Architect. There he was responsible for spearheading materials and prototyping innovations to enable future generations of products. Lancaster was instrumental in the development of the 13″/15″ Macbook Pro with the touch bar, and the design of unreleased Apple products. He is a named inventor of over 40 patents, including several on the use of advanced composites for consumer electronics applications.
“I’m excited to join Arris because they have achieved the elusive capability of producing composites that meet the high-volume, high-performance needs of flagship products at some of the world’s leading companies,” said Lancaster. “As the Head of Consumer Products, I look forward to working with these leaders to make products that are smaller, stronger, stiffer, lighter – and that’s just the beginning of the conversation.”
When fashion brands talk about diverting materials from landfill that could be made into clothing, they’re often talking about using deadstock fabric or turning plastic bottles into recycled nylon. But United by Blue, an outdoor apparel brand, has focused its sights on something a bit less ubiquitous: bison wool.
The coming year will bring a lot of new and proven things to the fitness industry at the same time. Combinations like Yoga and High Intensive Interval Training (HIIT), a focus on a balanced body-mind-balance and an increased body awareness as well as an intensive focus on one’s own self. We show the most important trends that all fitness fans must be aware of in 2020.
1. Fitness Studios Expand Offer: Fitness Combined with Mental Wellness
I’m sitting at the edge of Lake Llydaw on the foothills of Mount Snowdon, watching the rain hit the water sideways. As the cloud thickens and breathes again, the vertical wall of the mountain disappears from view then resurfaces. So persistent is the Welsh downpour, it has seeped through my waterproofs and filled my boots. I no longer know where the rain begins and my body ends. I can’t say the weather is screaming for a swim. Will I even feel the water if I go in, I wonder? Will it feel different to the water streaming from the sky? There is, of course, only one way to find out.
Getting undressed when the air temperature is 10 degrees and you are already drenched is definitely on the sadistic side of the pleasure spectrum but to a swimming nerd like me, also strangely exhilarating. As I enter the waters of Llydaw – considered by some to be the coldest lake in the UK – I feel like Obelix has dropped his boulder on my chest.
With the new list of top 10 fitness trends for 2020 from American College of Sports Medicine, we wanted to give you an inside look. As an annual survey that helps the health and fitness industry make informed business decisions, ACSM’s list can help you switch up and strengthen your training regimen.
Many of these may already be engrained in your routine, but employing some of these tactics could give you that extra boost in 2020. Let’s put some triathlete eyes on this top 10 list.
… Twenty-six triathletes (14 men, 12 women) faced two identical Olympic-distance triathlons 14 days apart in South Africa. One hour before the start of each race, they either took a placebo or a capsule containing 6mg of caffeine per kilogram of bodyweight.
On average, the men raced 1.7% faster after the caffeine, compared to 0.9% for the women. The majority of physiological markers remained similar, although cortisol was much higher in the men. The stress hormone rises during intense exercise, suggesting that the men could dig slightly deeper when racing on caffeine.
Iron plays a significant role in the body, and is specifically important to athletes, since it is a dominant feature in processes such as oxygen transport and energy metabolism. Despite its importance, athlete populations, especially females and endurance athletes, are commonly diagnosed with iron deficiency, suggesting an association between sport performance and iron regulation. Although iron deficiency is most common in female athletes (~ 15–35% athlete cohorts deficient), approximately 5–11% of male athlete cohorts also present with this issue. Furthermore, interest has grown in the mechanisms that influence iron absorption in athletes over the last decade, with the link between iron regulation and exercise becoming a research focus. Specifically, exercise-induced increases in the master iron regulatory hormone, hepcidin, has been highlighted as a contributing factor towards altered iron metabolism in athletes. To date, a plethora of research has been conducted, including investigation into the impact that sex hormones, diet (e.g. macronutrient manipulation), training and environmental stress (e.g. hypoxia due to altitude training) have on an athlete’s iron status, with numerous recommendations proposed for consideration. This review summarises the current state of research with respect to the aforementioned factors, drawing conclusions and recommendations for future work.
Neuromuscular fatigue (NMF) is usually assessed non-invasively in healthy, athletic or clinical populations with the combination of voluntary and evoked contractions. Although it might appear relatively straightforward to magnetically or electrically stimulate at different levels (cortical/spinal/muscle) and to measure mechanical and electromyographic responses to quantify neuromuscular adjustments due to sustained/repeated muscle contractions, there are drawbacks that researchers and clinicians need to bear in mind. The aim of this opinion paper is to highlight the pitfalls inevitably faced when NMF is quantified. The first problem might arise from the definition of fatigue itself and the parameter(s) used to measure it; for instance, measuring power vs. isometric torque may lead to different conclusions. Another potential limitation is the delay between exercise termination and the evaluation of neuromuscular function; the possible underestimation of exercise-induced neural and contractile impairment and misinterpretation of fatigue etiology will be discussed, as well as solutions recently proposed to overcome this problem. Quantification of NMF can also be biased (or not feasible) because of the techniques themselves (e.g. results may depend on stimulation intensity for transcranial magnetic stimulation) or the way data are analyzed (e.g. M wave peak-to-peak vs first phase amplitude). When available, alternatives recently suggested in the literature to overcome these pitfalls are considered and recommendations about the best practices to assess NMF (e.g. paying attention to the delay between exercise and testing, adapting the method to the characteristics of the population to be tested and considering the limitations associated with the techniques) are proposed.
… Arctic and high-mountain areas are warming more quickly than the rest of the world. When ice melts, it often reveals rock, soil, or ocean beneath it—all of which absorb heat rather than reflect it, as ice does. This in turn leads to greater surface warming, creating more ice melt, which leads to more warming, and on and on.
This is bad news for recreating in the snowy and icy parts of the world, according to the International Panel on Climate Change’s recent report on the ocean and cryosphere, which references almost 7,000 scientific publications. If emissions continue to rise at a similar rate as today’s, the globe’s glaciers could lose 80 percent of their mass by 2100.
Ben Williamson of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative has ideas that challenge the way his elders have approached conservation. Read the MoJo interview.
arXiv, Computer Science > Social and Information Networks; Aaron J. Schwartz, Peter Sheridan Dodds, Jarlath P.M. O'Neil-Dunne, Christopher M. Danforth, Taylor H. Ricketts from
With more people living in cities, we are witnessing a decline in exposure to nature. A growing body of research has demonstrated an association between nature contact and improved mood. Here, we used Twitter and the Hedonometer, a world analysis tool, to investigate how sentiment, or the estimated happiness of the words people write, varied before, during, and after visits to San Francisco’s urban park system. We found that sentiment was substantially higher during park visits and remained elevated for several hours following the visit. Leveraging differences in vegetative cover across park types, we explored how different types of outdoor public spaces may contribute to subjective well-being. Tweets during visits to Regional Parks, which are greener and have greater vegetative cover, exhibited larger increases in sentiment than tweets during visits to Civic Plazas and Squares. Finally, we analyzed word frequencies to explore several mechanisms theorized to link nature exposure with mental and cognitive benefits. Negation words such as ‘no’, ‘not’, and ‘don’t’ decreased in frequency during visits to urban parks. These results can be used by urban planners and public health officials to better target nature contact recommendations for growing urban populations.