Samsung’s latest competitor to the Apple Watch is here: the Galaxy Watch, a $330 fitness-focused smartwatch.
Samsung introduced the new smartwatch on stage at its Unpacked event last week. The Galaxy Watch isn’t Samsung’s first wearable, but it’s the first with the Galaxy brand name — in the past, Samsung’s smartwatches have been under the “Gear” branding.
The Galaxy Watch also sets itself apart with two key features: battery life (the watch can last up to four days on a single charge, Samsung says) and a rotating crown that lets you control the watch like a dial. Plus, it looks more like a standard watch than most other smartwatches on the market, Apple Watch included.
Rutgers University–New Brunswick engineers have created a smart wristband with a wireless connection to smartphones that will enable a new wave of personal health and environmental monitoring devices.
Their technology, which could be added to watches and other wearable devices that monitor heart rates and physical activity, is detailed in a study published online in Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
“It’s like a Fitbit but has a biosensor that can count particles, so that includes blood cells, bacteria and organic or inorganic particles in the air,” said Mehdi Javanmard, senior author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering.
Although pulse oximeters are ubiquitous in medical settings, only recently have they become available for athletes. These small but powerful devices can give you a snapshot of your body’s ability to process oxygen, which is a key factor in performance if you live or train at altitude, or tend to overtrain. Here we’ll investigate how these devices work, and how you might use them to optimize your performance.
Not everyone wants a fitness tracker or smartwatch strapped to their wrist. And although it is true such devices are the most popular in the category, wearable tech companies are increasingly looking elsewhere.
Feet represent one such opportunity. After all, this is the most logical place from which to monitor steps, distance and other associated metrics. Nevertheless, it is clear the race to make your footware smart is lagging behind.
Stryd wants to change that. The lightweight shoe-clip brings an entirely new metric to the world of running – power. Cyclists have been using this type of info for a while now, so its not news to them. But it is for runners.
IMU sensors are pretty useful because when strapped to the right location and given the right context they can provide very insightful information about an athlete’s (or anyone’s) movements. In this post, we are going to look at a couple of options in the market that allows us to skip the hardware development and jump right into the application development. Feel free to skip to the different sections that interest you:
There is plentiful publically available wearables data for the purposes of providing interesting and meaningful insights on lifestyle, health, fitness, and more. In this webinar, we highlight some clinically validated use cases for wearables and hearables and explain how to validate biometric wearable sensors against established clinical benchmarks to prevent “garbage-in/garbage-out” with wearable products.
Trainerize, the software known for digitizing the personal training experience, today announced an integration that allows any client using the Fitbit platform to seamlessly share important health and nutrition data with fitness professionals using Trainerize.
Through the Trainerize app, fitness professionals can invite their clients to use the Fitbit app to track their meals and automatically share and sync all of their nutrition and health data from the Fitbit app to Trainerize.
Garmin wearable users now have the option to gain deeper insights into the their heart health, following an announcement that the consumer tech company’ wearables will have the ability to integrate with heart health app Cardiogram.
“Many users have asked Cardiogram to support Garmin wearables. By directly integrating through the Garmin Health API, Cardiogram has access to the wide array of advanced metrics these devices generate,” Johnson Hsieh, cofounder of Cardiogram, said in a statement. “Garmin devices are great because they give us high-resolution, accurate data and the higher resolution, the more accurate DeepHeart can become.”
Today Strava announced two changes to their platform. One change makes little sense, while the other makes plenty of sense. The change that makes no sense will have no meaningful impact on you as a consumer, but will cause all heartache for companies in the cycling/running industry. While the change that actually makes sense may make it more appealing for you to give Strava your cash.
Also, they’re onboarding a million new users per month now. With that, let’s dive into the details.
… The first idea is that all technological change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away. This means that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage. The disadvantage may exceed in importance the advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the cost. Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious idea, but you would be surprised at how many people believe that new technologies are unmixed blessings. You need only think of the enthusiasms with which most people approach their understanding of computers. Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences.
ou probably know more about the health of your car than you know about your own health. When your car needs an oil change or a part is malfunctioning, embedded computers instantly let you know there is an issue. A similar “check engine” light remains the elusive grail of human health. New developments in patient recovery and health monitoring devices make me believe it will soon be within our grasp.
Today, most advanced clinical-grade monitoring equipment can’t leave the hospital and go home with the patient. The technology also limits the kind of information that wearable fitness devices can provide people during workouts and in daily life. Another big hurdle other is the inability to create a “personal baseline” for people. That is traditionally defined as measurements made during the occasional doctor visit — think blood pressure and heart rate and reflexes — compared to a global average that blends age, ethnicity, diet, altitude, and many other factors. My colleagues and I define personal baseline differently: real-time measurements of what’s happening in your body now compared to what it was this morning, yesterday, last week, and last month.
We’re reaching a point today where at-home clinical-grade data and a personal baseline of data for better diagnoses and maintaining better health overall are not only possible, but on the horizon.
If you’re prone to forgetting your headphones, new wearable technology that could turn your skin into a speaker should be music to your ears. Created in part to help the hearing and speech impaired, the new “smart skin” could be embedded into the ears—or into a patch on the throat. A similar device, described in the same study, acts as a microphone, which can be connected to smartphones and computers to unlock voice-activated security systems.
To build the speakers and the microphone, which are thinner than a temporary tattoo, the researchers needed to design electronics flexible enough to stretch and bend with the skin, without losing their capacity to conduct electricity and heat—both necessary to transmit audio signals.
After testing different materials, the scientists settled on grids of tiny silver wires coated with polymer layers, which were stretchy, transparent, and capable of conducting sound signals.
It’s the lightest synthetic fiber available, with a strong sustainable ID, but problems with dyeing due to its lower resistance to heat as compared to polyester, haven’t given polypropylene the credit it deserves, until now.
The latest development in textiles and fibers is a kind of soft hardware that you can wear: cloth that has electronic devices built right into it.
Researchers at MIT have now embedded high speed optoelectronic semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode photodetectors, within fibers that were then woven at Inman Mills, in South Carolina, into soft, washable fabrics and made into communication systems. This marks the achievement of a long-sought goal of creating “smart” fabrics by incorporating semiconductor devices — the key ingredient of modern electronics — which until now was the missing piece for making fabrics with sophisticated functionality.
This discovery, the researchers say, could unleash a new “Moore’s Law” for fibers — in other words, a rapid progression in which the capabilities of fibers would grow rapidly and exponentially over time, just as the capabilities of microchips have grown over decades.
The future of advanced implantable medical devices may depend on whether new, biocompatible sources of power can be developed. Batteries that work inside the body and eventually disintegrate may be important for devices that themselves can be resorbed. Researchers at Binghamton University have now developed a fully biodegradable battery that, though not directly designed for medical applications, may point to a new age in which tiny, electrically powered devices can be implanted to perform limited tasks and that don’t have to be removed after their job is done.
The “biobattery” made at Binghamton is cheap to produce, is flexible, and features a relatively high level of functional efficiency. It’s made out of paper and special polymers (poly (amic) acid and poly (pyromellitic dianhydride-p-phenylenediamine)), all of which is biodegradable (but not necessarily safe for humans).
… Even if an athlete is training specifically for 5K or 10K and will never race a half marathon, spending some time running at this not-too-intense (yet still aerobically demanding) pace does wonders to improve endurance and efficiency, develop a sense of race rhythm and ease the transition into more intense race-pace and below-race-pace running that will occur later in the training cycle. Half marathoners and marathoners will reap all these same benefits, in addition to developing the confidence that comes from running close to their race pace for an extended amount of time. I typically have athletes follow this type of tempo run with a session of short hill sprints—6 x 15-20 seconds at 90 percent effort with full recovery—to recruit fast-twitch fibers and promote good mechanics. This is an optional addition to the workout, but a good way to kill two birds with one stone.
The PhD student chats about the benefits of training with a group, competition in races, and his love of parkrun.
Jake Shelley has personal bests of 13:46 for 5000m and 7:59.57 for 3000m, so he certainly knows a little bit about running fast. In his most recent outing in Watford, the 27 year-old clocked 8:04.51 over 3000m.
That race saw 11 British athletes break the eight-minute barrier, a feat that has been in years, and although Shelley missed out on breaking the magic mark, he is grateful to people like organiser Mark Hookway, who are taking British endurance matters into their own hands and arranging races that bring together quality athletes on UK soil.
“To run fast times you need good competition,” says the 27 year-old. “Running the really fast times on the track or the road you need company. Doing it alone is really hard work.”
Running is easy—just lace up your sneakers and start moving at a faster pace than a walk. But running properly? That’s a lot easier said than done. Your unique running mechanics are determined by the strength and flexibility of certain muscles and how your body is built. “It’s important to pay attention to mechanics, even if you’re not an elite or professional runner,” says adidas high-performance coach Terrence Mahon.“We’re trying to do two things: One is not get hurt so that we can keep doing the thing we love to do, and two, we’re trying to do it with less effort and more efficiency,” In other words, the better your form, the easier running feels—especially when you start to get fatigued. Here’s what you should be paying attention to when you run, from your head to your toes.
My preferred way get in shape involves mercilessly tracking my effort and results. I have a mishmosh of fitness trackers and gadgets I use to monitor my daily progress towards, or away from, being physically fit. Integrating all that data into one place? Oy vey.
A recent visit to Los Angeles, where I was body shamed, left me feeling it was time to pick the flag back up and get in shape. I’d spent too much time hiding from old injuries and had gained a noticeable amount of weight. I knew just what to do, I’d start tracking my every move and calorie, just like every time I get back in shape.
At the core of this fitness effort is an Apple Watch, I use it to track my standard daily activity. I have been a fan of FitBit for a long time, but I lost my last tracker well over a year ago. Other members of my family love the Apple Watch, so I decided to try it out.
… [Reed] Ferber and other researchers have already been collecting wearable sensor data from UCalgary marathon groups for the last two years. “So we have a full data set for them,” Ferber says. In 2017, they started collecting data from a new group of marathoners. This year, they began working with and collecting data from marathon training groups at The Running Room, a Canadian retail shop that holds running clinics. Ferber is also partnering with UCalgary Dinos Athletics to do the same for varsity athletes – and, ideally, every Olympic, intramural and recreational athlete that wants to participate, too.
The researchers have started their data collection efforts with athletes because permission to collect the data is only needed from the athlete and the coach – plus, athletes have the extra incentive of wanting to maximize every legitimate tool and piece of data they can to help them improve their performance.
Ferber, who is leading a new Sensor Technology in Monitoring Movement research program, wants to generate a one-of-a-kind data set comprising millions of data points from hundreds of athletes. It will be added to each year – and it will be available to students and researchers for study and analysis.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Today from
A new University of Nebraska–Lincoln lab is going to the dogs — to study canine psychology and related interactions with humans.
Nebraska’s Canine Cognition and Human Interaction Lab will showcase its work during Husker DogFest, a free, open-to-the-public event, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Aug. 11 in the greenspace immediately south of Manter Hall. The event will include lab tours, professional dog demonstrations, dog activities, pet-related vendors and food vendors.
The lab is a research program created by Jeffrey Stevens, associate professor of psychology. Its research focuses on understanding both dog psychology and how interacting with dogs influences human behavior and psychology. The dog-focused part of the research will involve owners bringing their dogs into the lab to essentially play games for treats while researchers record data about their decision making and cognition. The other part of the research will have people interacting with dogs to see how it influences the people.