Outdoors + Tech newsletter – January 14, 2020

Outdoors + Tech news articles, blog posts and research papers for January 14, 2020

 

bracelets


Withings unveils new watch with ECG, Sp02 capabilities

MobiHealthNews, Laura Lovett from

French digital health company Withings has unveiled its latest smartwatch dubbed ScanWatch, which will include an ECG and Sp02 sensor.

The watch comes with a PPG sensor, which will continuously monitor the user’s heart rate and alert users if there is an irregularity. If any issues are detected, the watch will prompt the user to take an ECG reading. Watch wearers can read the ECG on the screen of their watch or in the watch’s accompanying Health Mate app. The app can store the reading and any notes that go along with the reading.

 

21% of Americans use a smart watch or fitness tracker

Pew Research Center, FactTank, Emily A. Vogels from

As 2020 begins – and health-related New Year’s resolutions take effect – roughly one-in-five U.S. adults (21%) say they regularly wear a smart watch or wearable fitness tracker, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 3-17, 2019.

As is true with many other forms of digital technology, use of these devices varies substantially by socioeconomic factors. Around three-in-ten Americans living in households earning $75,000 or more a year (31%) say they wear a smart watch or fitness tracker on a regular basis, compared with 12% of those whose annual household income falls below $30,000. Differences by education follow a similar pattern, with college graduates adopting these devices at higher rates than those who have a high school education or less, according to the survey of 4,272 U.S. adults.

 

Smartwatch Trends At CES 2020: The Wide World Of Wearables

aBlogtoWatch, Ariel Adams from

… technology brands today are viciously trying to follow consumer trends and preferences. Rather than imagine products that work for a variety of use-case scenarios, smartwatches are a good example of companies trying to match a product for a lifestyle. Even though most of the hardware and software guts of smartwatches are similar, products in 2020 seem to focus on appealing to niche consumer groups — examples of those groups being consumers who primarily want a smartwatch for health-tracking or those that want a smartwatch for fitness training. Still others want a smartwatch for specialized sports activities, trekking, or other relatively niche (but easy-to-imagine products around) uses. The irony, of course, is that, given the variety of things most smartwatch can do, this category segmentation can feel a bit arbitrary if you see them all in the same place. A case in point is Garmin, who, as a serious competitor in the wearables space, probably had more smartwatches to display at CES 2020 than any other company.

If you see all of Garmin’s smartwatches in the same room, any consumer would be predictably intimidated. In the real world, that is unlikely, according to Garmin. The reason for its very broad selection of smartwatches seems to be an attempt to offer a specialized product to various types of retailers around the world, as well as to various types of consumers who frequent those retailers. So in the case of Garmin, smartwatch product variety is related to the company attempting to satisfy a variety of retail and distribution channels.

 

non-wrist wearable


Whistle Labs Launches Innovative Pet Wearable Focused on Health and Fitness, as well as an All-New Nutrition Feature

PR Newswire, Whistle Labs from

Whistle Labs, the leader in pet health, fitness and location tracking, today announced a new product geared specifically towards pet health and fitness – Whistle FIT. Whistle FIT serves as a preventative healthcare tool and utilizes its wellness program for dogs. It provides customers with a simple and fully personalized experience to manage pet care through monitoring of a pet’s key health behaviors, food intake management, and activity. A service company at its core, Whistle Labs provides users with valuable insights that enable them to better care for their dogs.

 

PlayerMaker Raises $10 Million

Sports Wearable from

PlayerMaker, an Israel owned football tech startup, has recently raised $10 million in a Series B led by Feng He Group. It has landed the mark for its smart sensors which get physically attached to players’ footwear.

The product is a small silicone strap which gets strapped to the side of soccer shoes and helps analyze player specific data via its state of art gyroscope and accelerometers. PlayerMaker provides coaching enhancement solutions for football academies. It analyses data and give coaches data regarding how many touches player has on a ball or the total distance travelled during a game.

 

PowerDot’s shocking electrical stimulation helped me recover like an athlete

The Next Web, Plugged, Matthew Beedham from

… PowerDot is an electric muscle stimulation device. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s similar to abdominal bands that promise to cut fat, increase muscle, and make your body Baywatch ready in just weeks without actually exercising. Thankfully, PowerDot takes a different tack. It positions itself as a “smart muscle recovery and performance tool.” It doesn’t claim to make you fitter, but it might lend a helping hand to your recovery.

With consistent and regular use PowerDot says its device can help athletes – and me, not an athlete – recover faster, reduce muscle soreness, increase strength and endurance, and generally “feel their best.”

The tech behind the premise is fairly simple and is nothing new. The device relies on something called the Gate Control theory, which claims a non-painful stimulus (in this case electricity), can block the pathways that transfer pain signals to the brain, thus lessening the sensation of discomfort. Note, these systems don’t actually heal you, but they can lessen your perception of pain.

 

software


How to Gamify Wellness Without Missing the Point

Built In Austin, Brian Nordli from

Within SuperBetter, a mobile game designed to improve the player’s mental health, each user’s journey begins with a simple question: What’s your challenge?

Instead of vanquishing a dragon or thwarting an evil wizard, the options range from anxiety to chronic pain to a desire to eat healthier.

What follows will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a video game, and that’s by design. The company uses the framework of role-playing games, combining quests, power-ups and villains to motivate users to change their real-life habits.

 

Bluetooth Is Good Now

Gizmodo, Adam Clark Estes from

… In its early days, Bluetooth’s bandwidth was crap, which is part of the reason why it was primarily used for telephone headsets. That changed dramatically with the introduction of Bluetooth 3.0 in 2009, but the real game-changer was a new technology called Bluetooth Low Energy which arrived with the 4.0 standard in 2011. This essentially split the standard into two segments: Bluetooth Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy. This was a big deal.

“Bluetooth Low Energy ultimately made it possible for anything and everything to be a connected device,” Chuck Sabin of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) told me recently. “It kicked off what you would consider the modern day internet of things.”

Part of the reason why this happened is that, at that time, Bluetooth was built into pretty much every phone on the market, and Bluetooth LE made it easier for developers to build apps that took advantage of Bluetooth’s capabilities.

 

Gatorade, Kinduct Streamline Hydration Recommendations

Kinduct from

Kinduct and Gatorade have partnered to create a new solution for athletes: Gx Powered by Kinduct. The innovative technology not only tracks an athlete’s body composition, but also doubles as a hydration recommendation engine. To do this the platform accounts for variables such as weather conditions and duration/type of exercise as well as hydration variance between pre-and-post workout. When both elements are considered, the platform creates a personalized hydration solution for each athlete. Since its first implementation, the Gx Powered by Kinduct has allowed athletes and coaches to monitor and contextualize hydration data alongside other important performance metrics such as in-game statistics, wellness metrics, and injuries.

 

hardware


No Job Is Too Small for Compact Geostationary Satellites

IEEE Spectrum, Michael Koziol from

Two companies, Astranis and GapSat, plan to launch GEO smallsats in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Both companies acknowledge that there will always be a place for those hulking, minibus-size satellites. But they say there are plenty of business opportunities for a smaller, lighter, more flexible version—opportunities that the newly popular low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations aren’t well suited for.

Market forces have made GEO smallsats desirable; technological advances have made them feasible. The most important innovations are in software-defined radio and in rocket launching and propulsion.

 

A space-age breakthrough could make satellite coverage cheaper than ever

Inverse, Mike Brown from

… While many constellations use tens of satellites to achieve full coverage, researchers at Cornell University may have discovered a means to achieve similar service with far fewer. By harnessing the sort of forces that normally degrade satellites, the team was able to create a design that could achieve 86 percent coverage over a 24-hour period and 95 percent coverage over a 48-hour period. The research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and involving collaborating from a number of institutions, was published Friday in the journal Nature Communications.

 

Nano antennas for data transfer

University of Würzburg, News from

For the first time, physicists from the University of Würzburg have successfully converted electrical signals into photons and radiated them in specific directions using a low-footprint optical antenna that is only 800 nanometres in size.

 

gear


Cutting-edge running tech from CES 2020

Canadian Running Magazine, Madeleine Kelly from

… NURVV insoles are designed to give a runner feedback on their stride, cadence, pronation, foot strike and balance. The insoles provide similar data to the above Asics shoe, but the benefit is that if you’re not an Asics runner (or you have multiple shoes on the go at once) you’re able to transfer the rechargeable insoles from shoe t0 shoe.

The shoe has 32 sensors to track movement. This data is translated in coaching tips and training advice. Not only do this insole provide stride feedback but they also have a GPS function and up to five hours of battery life.

 

The Best Winter Running Shoes of 2020

GearJunkie, Steve Graepel from

When the sun takes a sabbatical on the south side and winter’s cold bite starts to sink deep, you don’t need to hang your head over the treadmill. Chin up, we’ve found the best winter-worthy shoes to keep you running outside all year long.

 

ASICS Opens Doors To Innovation Labs At CES 2020

PR Newswire, ASICS from

ASICS takes its science out of the lab and showcases the technology behind their ground-breaking innovations at CES 2020 with the ASICS Energy Research Lab. This booth lifts the curtain on the work done by the world-renown researchers of the ASICS Institute of Sport Science (ISS), bringing their lab into the real world and demonstrating how technology can help us run further, faster and easier.

ASICS PRESENTS FIRST SMART SHOE PROTOTYPE

ASICS opened the booth with the announcement that it will be launching a range of smart shoes in close partnership with Japanese start-up and sensor technology pioneers no new folk studio Inc. (nnf). The unique partnership sees the fusion of nnf’s precise, multi-dimensional sensors with ISS’s deep knowledge and expertise in human movement, as ASICS continues to enrich sports experiences through digital technologies.

 

materials


Burnham praises Manchester’s innovation in Graphene.

About Manchester (UK), Nigel Barlow from

Andy Burnham, Mayor for Greater Manchester, made a fact-finding tour of facilities that are pioneering graphene innovation at The University of Manchester.

The Mayor toured the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) which is an industry-facing facility specialising in the rapid development and scale up of graphene and other 2D materials applications.

As well as state-of-the art labs and equipment, the Mayor was also shown examples of commercialisation – including the world’s first-ever sports shoes to use graphene which has been produced by specialist sports footwear company inov-8 who are based in the North.

 

Bandage material helps stop bleeding without adhering to the wound

ETH Zurich, News from

Researchers from ETH Zurich and the National University of Singapore have developed a new kind of bandage that helps blood to clot and doesn’t stick to the wound. This marks the first time that scientists have combined both properties in one material.

 

HydraPak to Support Cupless Racing at Big Sur Marathon

Endurance Sports Wire, Big Sur Marathon Foundation from

With over a decade of uninterrupted designation as a zero-waste event organization, the Big Sur Marathon Foundation (BSMF) is excited to announce a partnership with HydraPak as their official reusable hydration gear partner. HydraPak will bring its premium reusable hydration product line and sustainability mission to participants and visitors of the 35th Annual Big Sur International Marathon this April.

 

stories


How Even a Little Sleep Loss Hinders Your Athletic Performance

Cleveland Clinic, health essentials from

… Doctors see the biggest detriment in lost sleep for those in endurance sports, Dr. Downey says. You’re less likely to see an impact in athletic events like weightlifting, where you need short bursts of energy.

This is mainly because lack of sleep reduces motivation, a key driver in maintaining performance in endurance sports.

With these sports, runners or cyclists often hit a wall at some point and motivation is what helps them push through to the finish. The less sleep you have, the less likely you are to summon that motivation when you need it, Dr. Downey says.

 

Maximizing Recovery and Monitoring with Robin Thorpe

SimpliFaster Blog from

… He has worked with many high-profile athletes and assisted in the preparation of the Mexican national football team leading up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup. In May of this year, Dr. Thorpe accepted a position as Director of Performance & Innovation at ALTIS, working with elite track and field athletes in the lead-up to the Olympic Games (Tokyo 2020). As part of his role, he serves as the Director of the ALTIS LIVING LAB, which integrates applied and academic sports performance research in the field to push the boundaries of sports innovation science and knowledge to athletes, coaches, and the industry as a whole.

Freelap USA: Recovery is a wide topic today, and many coaches are afraid for athletes to get tired. When is it okay for athletes to be fatigued, and how does this encourage positive adaptations? It’s important to be fresh for quality sessions, but sometimes you have to push through fatigue. Can you give some pointers on when it’s okay to train through fatigue?

Robin Thorpe: Professionalism in sport has provided the foundation for elite athletes to focus purely on training and competition. Furthermore, high-performance sport and the importance of athletes’ success have led athletes and coaches alike to continually seek any advantage or edge that may improve performance. Enhancing recovery through training and performance may provide numerous benefits during repetitive high-level training and competition, and the rate and quality of recovery in the high-performance athlete may be as important as the training itself.

 

biking


Do Mountain Bikers Know When They Have Had a Concussion and, Do They Know to Stop Riding? – PubMed – NCBI

Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine from

OBJECTIVE:

To establish the prevalence of concussions in mountain bikers and to determine factors that increase their risk of concussion. Secondary objectives include determination of whether mountain bikers have undiagnosed concussions, continue to ride after experiencing concussion symptoms, and if they knowingly ride with a broken helmet.
DESIGN:

Retrospective survey.
SETTING:

Seven-day mountain bike stage race.
PARTICIPANTS:

Two hundred nineteen mountain bikers.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:

Number of rider concussions diagnosed, number of riders experiencing concussion symptoms without diagnosed concussions, number of riders who continue to ride after experiencing a concussion symptom, and number of riders who rode with a broken helmet.
INDEPENDENT VARIABLES:

The independent variables studied included age, gender, nationality, number of times riding in past year, style of riding (cross-country, downhill, or freeride), years mountain biking, years mountain bike racing, whether they are a sponsored cyclist, and whether they also ride a road bike.
RESULTS:

Fifteen of 219 mountain bikers (6.9%) had a diagnosed concussion after being hit in the head while mountain biking within the past year, with older riders having a decreased risk [odds ratio (OR), 0.91; P = 0.04], and sponsored riders having a 5-fold increased risk compared with nonsponsored riders (OR, 4.20; P = 0.05). Twenty-eight riders (12.8%) experienced a concussion symptom without being diagnosed with a concussion and 67.5% of the riders who experienced a concussion symptom continued to ride afterward. Overall, 29.2% of riders reported riding with a broken helmet.
CONCLUSIONS:

The yearly prevalence of diagnosed concussions in mountain bikers is 6.9%. More than one-third of mountain bikers do not recognize when they have had a concussion and continue riding after experiencing concussion symptoms or with a broken helmet. These behaviors increase their risk of worsening concussion symptoms and acquiring a second injury.

 

High-quality handlebar bags for your bike trip

Popular Science, from

If you are planning a bike tour, or if your bicycle is your primary method of transportation, a handlebar bag is all but required for hauling your necessities. When choosing one, you’ll want to consider its material, size, and bonus features. Here are some of our recommendations.

 

data


What Artificial Intelligence Says About Running Form

Outside Online, Alex Hutchinson from

Researchers deploy machine learning to match running styles to the risk of different types of injury

 

Biodiversity and our brains: how ecology and mental health go together in our cities

The Conversation, Zoe Myers from

Neuroscientific research and tools now allow us to examine more deeply some of the ways in which individuals experience spaces and natural elements. This knowledge can greatly add to, and shift, the priorities and direction of urban design and planning.

What do we mean by ‘nature’?

A large body of research has compellingly shown that “nature” in its many forms and contexts can have direct benefits on mental health. Unfortunately, the extent and diversity of natural habitats in our cities are decreasing rapidly.

 

Interactive: How Does Nature Influence Human Health?

The Scientist Magazine® from

… Do natural environments themselves impart health benefits, or is the relationship merely correlational? What specific features of the environment are linked to improved health outcomes, and can they be harnessed by researchers to improve public health?

Several research groups are now trying to answer these questions using a combination of observational, computational, and experimental approaches. Here, The Scientist explores some of those research projects in a series of articles on how natural environments affect human health.

Click on a circle below to read more about a particular proposed mechanism, and follow the link to learn about the latest research on the topic.

 

public lands


Underground Legend Finishes Hiking’s Triple Crown—For His Fourth Time

Adventure Journal, Jeff Moag from

In September, not long after he turned 60, Bill “One Gallon” Nedderman finished the Pacific Crest Trail and quietly became the first person ever to complete North America’s big three hiking trails (the PCT, Appalachian Trail, and Continental Divide Trail) four times each—a distinction he calls the Quadruple Triple Crown, if you can get him to talk about it.

 

Here’s What Your Favorite Ski Resort May Look Like in 2085

Eos, Jenessa Duncombe from

For those living in the West, the winter of 2014-2015 went down as one of the worst ski seasons in memory. Snow levels were so low that some ski resorts didn’t open, whereas others limped along with subpar snowpacks. Skiers and snowboarders at Whistler Blackcomb, a resort in Vancouver, British Columbia, rode trams to midmountain to reach snow.

According to new research from the University of British Columbia, the winter of 2014-2015 may become the new normal.

Climate change could significantly lower the number of skiable days across western North America, forcing some ski resorts to shut down entirely. The study, which uses historical data and model projections, forecasts that more than 90% of western resorts will have ski seasons shorter than 120 days by 2085 if countries don’t curb greenhouse gas emissions.

 

Feds propose opening Utah’s San Rafael Desert to more motorized use

The Salt Lake Tribune, Brian Maffly from

Depending on whom you ask, motorized recreation either threatens to overwhelm Utah’s public lands or has been choked off by bureaucrats and environmentalists bent on keeping vast reaches off-limits to those who can’t walk long distances.

The emerging dispute over a revised travel plan for Emery County’s San Rafael Desert, south of Green River, illustrates this great divide that the Bureau of Land Management must navigate in determining where off-road vehicles can roam.

The land agency recently released a draft plan detailing four wide-ranging alternatives for the 377,609-acre area east of the more famous San Rafael Swell and includes recently designated wilderness in Labyrinth Canyon.

 

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