Fitbit is still out there living its life and launching products despite a looming acquisition by Google that could upend the entire company any month now. Today Fitbit announced the Charge 4, the latest in its line of Charge devices that kind of sit at the halfway point between a smartwatch and a basic fitness tracker. The Charge 4 has the same body as the Charge 3, just with updated internals.
You won’t be installing apps or playing music on it any time soon, but it can sync to your smartphone and show notifications on the grayscale OLED touchscreen. The device is mostly focused on fitness features, with exercise recognition, an activity dashboard, move reminders, and tracking of just about everything, including your general activity, your heart rate, and sleep.
… It’s not just that the Ironman GPS R300 looks retro. But, I mean…the bezels. They’re gigantic! Then there’s the interface, which relies on a mix of buttons and swiping. The Timex app isn’t the worst I’ve used, but the device itself isn’t as zippy when it comes to syncing or installing over-the-air updates as newer fitness trackers and smartwatches. But overall, the Ironman GPS R300 isn’t offering anything you haven’t already seen in a GPS watch. It has push notifications, limited on-wrist coaching, a transflective color touchscreen, music control, continuous heart rate-monitoring, and, of course, built-in GPS. It also tracks sleep. That’s all on par with other fitness trackers. But calling it a smartwatch? That’s a bit of a stretch. There’s no NFC payments, no app store, no third-party app integrations, no voice assistant capability—basically, the new Timex lacks most of the features you’d expect from a smartwatch in 2020.
Wareable (UK), Carrie Marshall and James Stables from
… as Fitbit goes through this major change, we’ve taken a look at how it all started. How Fitbit broke through the wearable tech arms race to become a household name, achieve a $4.1bn IPO in 2015, and what happened next.
Fitbit’s gone from hopeful startup to a tech powerhouse in just a few years. But how did it get here? Like all good stories, this one involves triumph, terror and even a little bit of sex.
Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business from
The use of artificial intelligence (AI), technologies that can interact with the environment and simulate human intelligence, has the potential to significantly change the way we work. Successfully integrating AI into organizations depends on workers’ level of trust in the technology. A new review examined two decades of research on how people develop trust in AI. The authors concluded that the way AI is represented, or “embodied,” and AI’s capabilities contribute to developing trust. They also proposed a framework that addresses the elements that shape users’ cognitive and emotional trust in AI, which can help organizations that use it.
The review, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Bar Ilan University, appears in Academy of Management Annals.
“The trust that users develop in AI will be central to determining its role in organizations,” explains Anita Williams Woolley, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study. “We addressed the dynamic nature of trust by exploring how trust develops for people interacting with different representations of AI (e.g., robots, virtual agents, or embedded) as well as the features of AI that facilitate the development of trust.”
Google Fit has received another redesign, and this time the focus is on a favorite aspect of fitness tracking: step counts. The Android, iOS and Wear OS versions of Fit have shunted the Move Minutes goal to the side in place of the step count and Heart Points. In theory, this caters to the step-obsessed while ensuring that you’re still getting in the more intense exercise needed for a truly active lifestyle.
The redesign also brings bolder, easier-to-glimpse visuals and progress cards that surface when you’re close to reaching a goal. On Wear OS, new Tiles can start workouts and provide at-a-glance updates on your progress for daily and weekly goals.
The raft of technologies and digital tools used in Personalised Nutrition (PN) represents a scalable approach that could help transition to a service based on individual prevention and self‐care.
From a corner of the pool at the Easton/Phillipsburg Branch of the Greater Valley YMCA, the Coral Manta 3000 knows a human head from any old beach ball. The machine, which the branch is testing on behalf of YMCAs across the country, uses artificial intelligence to recognize body parts and learn how humans act in the pool in an effort to prevent drownings.
It’s not that the branch has had any drownings in the last 25 years, branch Executive Director Lori Metz said. Nor will the robot replace lifeguards.
After a profound development project, we are now getting ready to launch Movesense sensor firmware 2.0. It is a major update and brings loads of new capabilities to the system.
We are first publishing a sneak preview to let you try out your own code with it and to leave us an opportunity to root out any remaining issues before the official release. You can find the preview on Bitbucket in movesense-device-lib repository in a branch release/2.0-preview.
To truly understand an animal species is to observe its behavior and social networks in the wild. With new technology described today (April 2) in PLOS Biology, researchers are able to track tiny animals that divide their time between flying around in the sky and huddling together in caves and hollow trees – by attaching little backpacks to them with glue.
These high-tech backpacks, which can communicate with each other and ground-based receivers, provided data for the popular study published on Halloween in 2019 showing that vampire bats developed social bonds in captivity that they maintained in the wild.
The wireless network developed by a team of engineers, computer scientists and biologists contains functions similar to what we find in our smartphones – such as motion detection and Bluetooth-style connectivity – at a fraction of the weight and energy consumption.
… Knowing all this, if I were still a retail shop employee and someone asked me, Hey Man, what’s the best rain jacket? I would have three possible responses:
“Jacket X. Jacket X is the most expensive rain shell we carry, so obviously it is the best.”
“How much college did you get? You should get more college and then go read about waterproof breathable materials on the internet.”
“Jacket Y. I wear Jacket Y, and I have climbed literally dozens of mountains, plus I work here, which means I must know something about gear.”
The ASICS Metaracer is the company’s newest, and fastest, road-racing shoe. The carbon-plated, Sunrise Red shoe is lower in profile when compared to the other road-racing shoes on the market, making it one of the lightest in the business. At 190 grams for a men’s size 9, this shoe strikes an impressive balance between light and springy. This is exactly what a runner wants to be on a marathon start line, and for as long as possible during the race.
Runners are constantly trying to find the perfect shoe that will combine increased performance with decreased injury risk. In this podcast, Dr. Liam West poses the questions to Dr. Laurent Malisoux to explore whether the current body of research is able to guide the clinician as to which shoe type is perfect for which foot type. Dr. Malisoux is a key researcher at the Sports Medicine Research Laboratory at the Luxembourg Institute of Health. His area of research and expertise centres on running shoes and potential risk factors for injury. [audio, 17:40=
The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, physical distance easily maintained, and no pandemic can suspend it. Nature offers not just escape but reassurance.
Training all winter in anticipation of spring races requires great motivation and discipline. When all of the upcoming races evaporated from the schedule, Durango-based ultrarunners looked to put their fitness to use any way possible.
For Kyle Curtin, the second American man to the finish line behind fellow Durangoan Jason Schlarb at last year’s Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, it was a 17-hour effort on his favorite home mountain, Hogsback. For 2019 Big’s Backyard Ultra winner Maggie Guterl, it was a 100-mile week. And for so many others, it is a weekly challenge from the Durango Running Club. It’s all an effort to stay active and entertained in a time in which races have been canceled because of COVID-19, as the coronavirus pandemic has swept the country and world.
Urban Cycling Institute, Manuela Ferreira Torres from
Mobility practices influence children and young people’s understanding of the city that surrounds them. As society develops into insulated bubbles, being underway is one of the few remaining moments in which we engage with social and spatial surroundings. By being less accompanied, children and young people increase their learning of how to negotiate with their surroundings in their own way. Besides the acquisition of ‘spatial knowledge’, the exposure to our social and spatial environments correlates strongly with characteristics such as ‘sense of place’, ‘mutual trust’, and ‘feeling part of a larger whole’ (1).
… The key findings seem completely intuitive, but it is nice to have these underlined. It should be noted this is a cohort qualitative study and therefore level IV evidence.
“The results of this study have implications for both prevention and treatment as women with SF reported running more, overtraining, and poorer nutrition and were less likely respond to pain. Based on what women reported, they need guidance on how to progress running safely.”
A study from Evidation Health with 160,000 U.S. participants, including 68,000 with fitness trackers, examined how people are feeling, moving and sleeping while under orders to stay home to combat the spread of coronavirus.
It found that people are moving less in all states and sleeping more.
… In wide-open spaces, where people can maintain adequate space, the risk of infection is vanishingly low. But it may be slightly higher in crowded spaces where people are walking close to one another or zigzagging through one another’s paths. “I’m not going to be a false optimist and say the risk is zero,” says Dylan Morris, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University who co-authored a recent study about the novel coronavirus’s ability to live in the air and on different surfaces.
… The closures coincided with Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s executive order banning all nonessential travel outside the home until further notice. The order also shut down playgrounds and closed all public and private campgrounds in the state.
The sudden wave of closures left many Oregonians reeling, wondering if there was some way to keep our cherished outdoor spaces open while maintaining public health. How and why were these severe decisions made?
The Bureau of Land Management is considering industry-driven requests to lease tens of thousands acres for oil and gas development near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.
In recent months, firms sought to nominate up to 360 parcels on these scenic lands popular for dispersed outdoor recreation outside Moab.
… physicists at MIT have come up with a blueprint for a device they believe would be able to convert ambient terahertz waves into a direct current, a form of electricity that powers many household electronics.
Their design takes advantage of the quantum mechanical, or atomic behavior of the carbon material graphene. They found that by combining graphene with another material, in this case, boron nitride, the electrons in graphene should skew their motion toward a common direction. Any incoming terahertz waves should “shuttle” graphene’s electrons, like so many tiny air traffic controllers, to flow through the material in a single direction, as a direct current.
Researchers have designed a machine learning method that can predict battery health with 10x higher accuracy than current industry standard, which could aid in the development of safer and more reliable batteries for electric vehicles and consumer electronics.