There’s a chance your Fitbit, Apple Watch, WHOOP or another smartwatch device could mean more to your health than just counting your steps, recommending you go to sleep earlier or reminding you to get off your couch.
Known as fitness wearables, fitness trackers or simply a smartwatch, the devices are a more elaborate version of the everyday wristwatch, and millions are using them in a pairing with their smartphones to track various body metrics — from heart rate and temperature to blood oxygen levels.
Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, told ESPN that smartwatches are “incredible devices” — so incredible that they have the potential to track COVID-19 and other viral diseases if “networked appropriately.”
… First-quarter results were not overly affected by the ongoing pandemic, but management withdrew its fiscal 2020 guidance. Garmin believes it will remain profitable in the second quarter, though it expects a sharp decline in sales. During the earnings call, CEO Clifton Pemble noted, “On a consolidated basis, our April sales are trending about 40% lower than last year, as many retailers have curtailed operations and consumer activity has been severely limited by government restrictions. We expect these trends to continue throughout the second quarter as restrictions remain in place across much of the globe.”
Looking beyond the current crisis, the popularity of the company’s products may even expand. A focus on health and wellness should have more people looking at its fitness and outdoor offerings. The freedom offered by recreational boating and flying may become even more popular for those with means as well.
The campus may be empty and the halls hallowed, yet there is groundbreaking COVID-related work going on at Northwestern University’s engineering lab.
“It’s a soft-skin compatible device, it goes on the body much like a band aid,” said Northwestern University Professor John Rogers.
About the size of a band-aid, Rogers helped develop a wireless device that tracks the most common symptoms of COVID-19, and it is placed right above the collarbone at the center of the neck. [video, 2:14]
North Carolina State University, NC State News from
Engineering researchers have created ultrathin, stretchable electronic material that is gas permeable, allowing the material to “breathe.” The material was designed specifically for use in biomedical or wearable technologies, since the gas permeability allows sweat and volatile organic compounds to evaporate away from the skin, making it more comfortable for users – especially for long-term wear.
“The gas permeability is the big advance over earlier stretchable electronics,” says Yong Zhu, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “But the method we used for creating the material is also important because it’s a simple process that would be easy to scale up.”
Specifically, the researchers used a technique called the breath figure method to create a stretchable polymer film featuring an even distribution of holes. The film is coated by dipping it in a solution that contains silver nanowires. The researchers then heat-press the material to seal the nanowires in place.
… When you measure your heart rate, you will get a beats per minute value. At rest, this ranges between 60 and 80 for most people. The fitter you are, generally the lower your resting heart rate. This is due to the heart getting bigger and stronger with exercise, and getting more efficient at pumping blood around the body.
However, your heart does not beat with a steady rhythm. The intervals vary from one heartbeat to the next. And this is where HRV comes in. Put simply, it measures the variation in the time interval between heartbeats.
It is all linked to your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. These are parts of your autonomic nervous system that control your body’s survival functions such as breathing, heart rate, digestion, organ control and blood pressure.
Yesterday morning digital health and fitness company Pear Sports announced its purchase of artificial intelligence exercise-coaching platform Performance Lab.
Performance Lab specializes in using AI to gain insights into athletic performance and then develop a personalized exercise program. Pear Sports plans to use this technology in its real-time interactive coaching tool.
“The mission at Pear Sports is to leverage increasingly pervasive activity data from wearables, interpret it and apply it in ways that can impact the effectiveness of digital coaching and even human touch coaching,” Bob Allison, founder of Pear Sports, said. “Adding Performance Lab’s science and AI algorithms to PEAR’s real-time coaching technology means we will be able to offer the only truly intelligent, custom adaptive-training solution on the market. We are thrilled to welcome the experienced team at Performance Lab to [Pear Sports] and to work together to create a powerful player in the digital health and fitness arena.”
If you’ve ever used a Wear OS smartwatch, or searched for fitness apps on your iPhone or Android phone, you’ll have come across Google Fit – Google’s fitness hub for tracking and recording your exercise and workouts.
There are plenty of fitness apps out there like Strava, Huawei Health, Fitbit and Apple Health, many of which are linked to specific wearables – and Google Fit is very much of this vein, even if it lacks some of the social features of its competitors.
Sustainability is shaping the sports industry like never before. Today, manufacturers of running shoes are also focusing on more environmentally friendly materials and production processes – even though it is not yet possible to do without plastics entirely.
Now more than ever, we’re starting adventures from our doorstep. If those journeys end up on gnarly rock-and-root-strewn mountainsides, or even venture onto muddy paths, we need a shoe that can handle the traction, cushioning and support challenges of a wide variety of terrains. Fortunately, these models will shine from sidewalk to single-track with a smooth and supportive feel wherever you take them.
Class is in session with our new video series The Homework Project, which gives you a front-row seat as our team athletes share their best tips, tricks, creative quests, and more—all from their own homes.
In our first episode, we get a little homeschooling in strength training with big mountain skier, Johnny Collinson. The first assignment? Build your own War Machine. [video, 3:56]
Powercast Corporation, the leader in radio-frequency (RF)-based long-range over-the-air wireless power technology, and Liquid X, an advanced manufacturer of functional metallic inks with prototype-to-production design and manufacturing capabilities, today announced a printed electronics venture to enable garment manufacturers to easily integrate wireless power functionality into durable, flexible, high performance and washable e-textiles.
Utilizing Liquid X’s proprietary ink technology, manufacturers can print circuitry directly onto a garment, add Powercast’s wireless power technology and a battery, and seal this all into the garment during the manufacturing process. The two companies’ goal is to enable cost-effective manufacturing of durable e-textiles, with battery-powered features such as health and wellness, movement monitoring, or LED-based illumination embedded directly into garments, that consumers can conveniently recharge over the air, and wash, without having to remove a battery pack.
Science Advances, Patricia Jastrzebska-Perfect et al. from
Bioelectronic devices should optimally merge a soft, biocompatible tissue interface with capacity for local, advanced signal processing. Here, we introduce an organic mixed-conducting particulate composite material (MCP) that can form functional electronic components by varying particle size and density. We created MCP-based high-performance anisotropic films, independently addressable transistors, resistors, and diodes that are pattern free, scalable, and biocompatible. MCP enabled facile and effective electronic bonding between soft and rigid electronics, permitting recording of neurophysiological data at the resolution of individual neurons from freely moving rodents and from the surface of the human brain through a small opening in the skull. We also noninvasively acquired high–spatiotemporal resolution electrophysiological signals by directly interfacing MCP with human skin. MCP provides a single-material solution to facilitate development of bioelectronic devices that can safely acquire, transmit, and process complex biological signals. [full text]
Every few years we get hype around a specific item or material that changes the game for thru-hikers. Whether this be personal GPS devices allowing for navigation and rescue, Guthooks Guides in 2012, the Sawyer Squeeze, or more recently in 2016/2017 Cuben Fiber (now marketed as Dyneema), all these technological advancements fundamentally change the hiking game in terms of distance, speed, share-ability and do-ability of thru-hiking. It has enabled hikers to be better equipped with up-to-date routes, water source information, and allowed us to upgrade to lighter and more durable gear, eventually getting us farther, faster.
A lot of this technology has made it easier for us to get out and stay outside longer, but it has also increased the dependency we have on the batteries inside our phones, GPS devices, Bluetooth headphones, and cameras. Now a new material promises a change in the way we hike: introducing Graphene.
Carbohydrate intake during exercise can enhance endurance exercise performance. This is one of the most well studied and established scientific findings in the sports nutrition literature. We discussed some of the background in this articleand current recommendations are discussed here. These recommendations are to consume 30-60 g/h carbohydrate for events lasting 1 – 2.5 h and for events over 2.5 h up to 90 g/h. If more than 60g/h is ingested it is important to realise that the type of carbohydrate that is ingested is critically important. With these large amounts, a combination of carbohydrates, for example glucose and fructose, needs to be ingested.
… We investigated the impact of 15, 30, and 45 g of milk protein during recovery of a single session of endurance exercise in trained cyclists. Both myofibrillar (contraction) and mitochondrial (energy production) protein synthesis were measured. The endurance exercise consisted of 1.5 hours of cycling on 60% of the Wmax of the subject.
None of the protein doses stimulated mitochondrial protein synthesis rates.
In addition, 15 g of milk protein was not enough to significantly stimulate myofibrillar protein synthesis after the cycling exercise. But both the 30 and 45 g protein dose stimulated myofibrillar protein synthesis after cycling, with no significant differences between the doses. Statistical analyses showed that ~0.49 g/kg was the optimal dose.
… Exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist, Stacy Sims, published a well-received book – Roar – that looks specifically at females in sport. Its main purpose was to debunk the perception that women are just ‘small men’ and provide a rationale for why we shouldn’t be training, fuelling and hydrating ourselves in the same way as our male counterparts.
Stacy suggests females should approach hydration differently to men based on differences in our sodium and fluid balance. Those differences are attributed to the menstrual cycle and the fluctuating hormones which regulate it.
Clearly, there are physiological differences between males and females, but to what extent should these impact how we hydrate?
An extensive new study from Portland State University has found that installing bike lanes will likely bring about positive economic impacts to local businesses along the affected streets. Focusing on streets with a heavy presence of food service and retail businesses, the researchers found that most businesses benefited overall—seeing growth in employment and sales, specifically—from bike lanes being installed on their respective streets.
Part of the National Study of the Economic Impact of Streets Improvements, the research was conducted by Jenny Liu, PhD, an associate professor at the university’s school of urban studies and planning, through a partnership with People For Bikes and the consulting firm Bennett Midland.
It hasn’t been this dangerous to ride a bicycle on American roads in three decades. And in the face of our greater public-health crisis, more people than ever are riding bikes to avoid public transportation and to safely exercise outside. That means that as restrictions lift and cars begin returning to our roads at pre-pandemic levels, even more cyclists will die. This year, Outside is tracking every cycling traffic fatality. Read more about why we’ve embarked on the #2020cyclingdeaths project.
Social media can reveal the psychological states of an entire population, according to new research.
The results show that through machine-learning—teaching a computer to identify and analyze patterns in large datasets—researchers can see, in principle, how a society is doing in real-time.
“These methods really show how to do psychological measurement in the 21st century in our digital world,” says Johannes Eichstaedt, an assistant professor of psychology at Stanford University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
“We had to be prepared for scale here. That isn’t just the app and the app store. The digital side is very easy to scale, but you had to be prepared to handle a massive intake of study visits and demand,” he said. “What if a whole bunch of people had AFib all along and day one of enrollment all got the notification and all called American Well? So, we had to build for exceptions and scale, which we did.”
While researchers were prepared to scale, there were also several lessons to be learned throughout the process that the partners are still addressing. In the study, around 2,200 participants got notifications about possible AFib. However, only 945 of those participants followed up with a study visit.
“On one hand, that is great. We had almost 1,000 study visits. On the other hand, we had significant attrition and loss of engagement,” Turakhia said.” So why was that? What can we improve? How can we make this more frictionless and study participants more adherent to procedures? It’s not like we have a study nurse at a local hospital that you know, and have a relationship with – and can call them. So, there is a lot here to learn.”
… According to anonymized Polar sleep data, since social distancing started, people have been, in fact, getting more sleep than before. If this trend continues, the pandemic may end up having positive effects on our health and well-being – in the form of better sleep.
As the world around us seems to be out of control, sleep is something that we can affect and adapt – sleep is a necessity, but also a useful tool, especially for athletes.
So, after the overwhelming amount of sad images and bad news, let’s take a moment to dig into the positive aspects of the COVID-19 epidemic and take a look at how the stay-at-home orders have affected sleep habits when comparing data from January through March of 2020.
The Pacific Crest Trail runs 2650 miles from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington. Hiking the whole thing usually takes months, but this video by Mac of Halfway Anywhere compresses the entire experience down to just three minutes presented in 1-second snippets.
… Now, with many parks starting to emerge from weeks of being closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, is the time right for taking a longer look at what the “national park experience” should be? That might be presumptuous, in that different people, cultures, and ethnicities surely approach that experience differently. Yet many onlookers would agree that the overall “park experience” has been impacted by overcrowding and visitors who, in some eyes, don’t see national parks with the proper reverence.
Back in 2016, shortly before the celebration of the Park Service’s centennial, Zion National Park Superintendent Jeff Bradybaugh told Traveler that, “We’re just seeing a different understanding of what the park is about. How to visit. I think some of that is education. We’re kind of overwhelmed.”
National parks are starting to reopen as they seek to balance public safety concerns about the coronavirus with responding to the White House’s push to start reopening sites.
Ahead of the busy summer season for national park visits, Everglades National Park in Florida reinstated access to certain roads on Monday as well as reopening a store and several restrooms, though it is keeping other roads and its visitor centers closed. The Associated Press reported that boaters had lined up to get in at 7 a.m. and were allowed into the water one at a time.
The plan is part of a phased approach to opening national parks after President Trump pushed last month for sites to reopen. The opening of the Everglades comes as states, including Florida, are gradually starting to restart their economies in the hopes that coronavirus infections have peaked.