It was the beginning of summer, but the water felt ice cold as Ramses Alcaide submerged his body into the lake and swam under two floating barrels. When he emerged from the other side, he sensed something important missing.
Under normal circumstances, Alcaide wouldn’t opt to shove his body back into freezing water, but the WHOOP — a $500 wearable device that measures body strain and is made by a Boston startup of the same name — was important enough that he spent a good 10 minutes looking under and around the floating barrels to find his prized possession.
“That’s how much I wanted it back,” recalls Alcaide, CEO and co-founder of Neurable, a Boston-based startup that shares a common investor with WHOOP.
… For the applied researcher, it’s a risk worth taking in order to get a genuine snapshot of human behaviour away from the artificialities of the laboratory. For people like myself, who are interested in physiological computing and using these data as inputs to technological systems, the challenge of accurate data capture in the real world is a fundamental issue. People don’t use technology in a laboratory, they use it out there in offices and cars and cafes and trains – and if we can’t get physiological computing systems to work ‘out there’ then one must question whether this form of technology is really feasible.
With these issues in my mind, I’ve been watching the discussions and debates around the accuracy of wearable sensors with considerable interest. These wrist-worn devices incorporate a PPG (photoplethysmogram) designed to measure heart rate. From the perspective of a psychophysiologist, heart rate is perhaps the easiest signal to measure in the real world with minimal intrusiveness or discomfort for the individual. In some ways, I see it as an early test case for physiological computing in the real world, if one can’t measure a gross signal like heart rate with a high degree of accuracy outside of the laboratory, then one wonders about our capability to accurately measure any signal at all. As a secondary issue for this article, but a topic of major importance in its own right, medical professionals are also asking the same question about wrist-worn sensors; they wish to know whether they can use wearable data for monitoring existing patients or triaging new ones.
Fitbit devices will be the first wearables used in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, an ambitious longitudinal study ultimately aiming to collect the baseline characteristics of 1 million or more Americans.
The wearable manufacturer announced that The Participant Center — a unit led by the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI) tasked with enrolling diverse populations into the national program — will be distributing 10,000 Fitbit Charge 2 and Fitbit Alta HR devices to a representative sample of All of Us participants. At the end of a one-year study period, researchers will provide the national program with recommendations on how Fitbit’s wearables may be more broadly employed in the national study. These devices will also collect an early data set of the users’ physical activity, heart rate, sleep, and other critical health outcomes.
Ever wonder what your heart rate is when you’re running while listening to music? The ear provides a great platform for doing this kind of biometric measurement. Earbuds, rather than watches, tend to be the most accurate heart-rate monitors, outperformed only by traditional chest straps.
Headphones are also great for people who work out and want to check their steps, distance traveled, and calories burned, on the fly. Some smart earbuds even claim to be able to track brain waves through EEG and provide real-time feedback about focus, stress, sleep patterns, and relaxation.
Wearables suppliers are increasingly looking beyond the wrist, and the ears may very well be the next big growth area. The best technology is invisible. This the road we’re going down.
Electronic muscle stimulation has been a well-known practice in athletic circles for years but it’s typically only available on bulky machines. But workout enthusiasts will soon have access to a new electronic muscle stimulation device that connects to an app on Apple and Android phones. Powerdot recently announced the launch of its product that uses EMS, or e-stim, which aims to enhance performance and recovery using electric impulses that cause a contraction in certain muscles.
The Singapore-based company says it has the first mobile, wearable smart muscle stimulation device. It originally got FDA clearance for the project in 2015. Compared to traditional, bulky e-stim machines, Powerdot’s device can fit in one hand.
The impact of Digital Health on patient care is accelerating with the increasing adoption of mobile health apps and wearable sensors. Health-related mobile applications available to consumers now surpass 318,500 — nearly double the number available just two years ago — with approximately 200 new apps added to the market each day. This rapid app expansion, coupled with more than 340 consumer wearable devices on the market worldwide, and 571 published efficacy studies, provide evidence of Digital Health’s accelerating innovation and generation of a subset of proven tools to impact human health, according to a new report released today by the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.
I am happy to announce our first major update to the global heatmap on Strava Labs since 2015. This update includes six times more data than before — in total one billion activities from all Strava data through September 2017.
Our global heatmap is the largest, richest, and most beautiful dataset of its kind. It is a direct visualization of Strava’s global network of athletes.
We learned last year that Snap is “a camera company”—but perhaps soon, it’s also going to be a fitness company.
A new patent awarded to Snapchat’s parent company today, Nov. 7, suggests that the company may include step tracking into its app. The patent outlines a potential new feature for Snapchat, where users agree to let the app use their phone’s sensor data to track their step count, “on a periodic basis.”
Rather like how Snapchat users can currently overlay how fast they’re traveling or how high up they are using filters that tap into their phone’s GPS, the new function would let them add how many steps they’ve currently walked to their snaps, according to the patent filing.
A KAIST team reported ultra-flexible organic flash memory that is bendable down to a radius of 300 μm. The memory exhibits a significantly-long projected retention rate with a programming voltage on par with the present industrial standards.
A joint research team led by Professor Seunghyup Yoo of the School of Electrical Engineering and Professor Sung Gap Im of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering said that their memory technology can be applied to non-conventional substrates, such as plastics and papers, to demonstrate its feasibility over a wide range of applications.
Spectral images, which contain more color information than is obtainable with a typical camera, reveal characteristics of tissue and other biological samples that can’t be seen by the naked eye. A new smartphone-compatible device that is held like a pencil could make it practical to acquire spectral images of everyday objects and may eventually be used for point-of-care medical diagnosis in remote locations.
Potential applications of the new device include detecting oxygen saturation in a person’s blood, determining the freshness of meat in the grocery store and identifying fruit that is the perfect ripeness. The spectrometer could also make it easier to acquire spectral data in the field for scientific studies.
In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Biomedical Optics Express, the researchers describe how to make the new pencil-like spectrometer and demonstrate its ability to acquire spectral images of bananas, pork and a person’s hand. The new device can detect wavelengths from 400 to 676 nanometers at 186 spots simultaneously.
… Throughout the years, I could distill the characteristics that make fitness trackers, sleep sensors or devices for monitoring vital health parameters great. In the case of swim sensors, the overcoming of three challenges is necessary. For a starter, the sensor needs to be waterproof, not just water resistant. Well, it seems to be obvious at first, since the gadget has to function under water, but it is not that easy to produce a waterproof tracker as it first sounds.
Secondly, it’s really difficult to analyze movements in the water: counting the turns, recognizing the swimming style, measuring vital health parameters. For being able to measure this complex set of movement, Apple gathered data from more than 700 swimmers and over 1,500 swim sessions and sends GPS data from your wrist to nearby Satellites.
The third challenge of swim tracking is measuring heart rate in water while the usual method for measurement doesn’t work in the pool.
When Brooks announced that they were creating a new shoe that would help you run farther and faster without needing to exert more energy, I was intrigued. I’m currently training for a half marathon, and training runs aren’t always easy. I’ve had some great training runs where the weather has been on my side, my body feels good, and the miles just fly by. But there have also been days where I wish I ran at a faster pace so my runs wouldn’t take so long. I’ve had mornings where I wish I could get in more than five miles, but I just didn’t have the extra energy to push farther. But now there’s a shoe that could help with both? I had to try it.
… Yi Cui, a materials scientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and colleagues have combined the insulating and IR approaches in a layered fabric that heats or cools depending on which side faces the wearer. The bulk of the 45-micron-thick material is made from polyethylene (PE), an inexpensive plastic, which in this case is shot through with nanometer-sized holes. This nano-PE blocks visible light, so you can’t see through it as you might polyethylene-based plastic wrap. But it allows the body’s IR to pass right through. Sandwiched inside is a two-part material: nano-PE that is coated on one side with IR-absorbing (and emitting) black carbon, and on the other side an ultrathin layer of copper that only weakly absorbs and emits IR.
Researchers have successfully incorporated washable, stretchable and breathable electronic circuits into fabric, opening up new possibilities for smart textiles and wearable electronics. The circuits were made with cheap, safe and environmentally friendly inks, and printed using conventional inkjet printing techniques.
That’s a repeated gag line in The Endless Summer, the classic 1966 documentary that follows two globetrotting surfers on a quest to find the perfect wave. Good surfing waves are a rarity, and even when all the forces come together, the magic is fleeting. Few beaches have a bottom contour that can transform a swell into waves that surfers want to ride, and even then, the vagaries of the swell—its size, angle, periodicity—mixed with ever-changing winds and tides mean great surf sessions are few and far between.
In central California farm country, 175 kilometers from the nearest beach, a champion surfer and a fluid mechanics specialist have teamed up to change that. In a 700-meter-long artificial lake, they’ve devised a system that drags a carefully shaped metal blade called a hydrofoil through the water. As the resulting swell sweeps over the lakebed, which scientists precisely contoured with the help of supercomputers, it is transformed into a surfing wave of unearthly perfection—again and again and again.