Outdoors + Tech newsletter – September 3, 2018

bracelets

… If it seems like everyone’s launching a smartwatch at IFA, a primary reason is that they’re all trying to get a jump on Apple.

Apple is expected to update its popular Apple Watch, which starts at $329, during an event on Sept. 12. The company’s WatchOS 5 software, unveiled in June at its WWDC developer conference and arriving on the next watch, brings a number of fitness improvements to the device, an instant watch-to-watch walkie-talkie mode, support for podcasts and an ability to play audio from third-party apps on the go.

Garmin Connect is loaded with amazing features to help you beat yesterday with your compatible Garmin device. We want to tell you about some of our favorite features that you may have overlooked.

Courses

If you open Courses in Garmin Connect, you can create a course to download and use on your device. Or search public courses where you want to walk, run or ride.

You can always rely on the IFA tech expo for a plethora of new hardware announcements, and IFA 2018 has been no different – and in among the laptops, TVs, smart speakers and other devices, we’ve seen plenty of wearables make a debut in Berlin this year.

To help you work out which of these new products might be worth a place on your wrist, we’ve put together our pick for the best wearables of IFA 2018.

non-wrist wearable

As the director of the University of Calgary’s Running Injury Clinic, Reed Ferber noticed something way back in 2009.

“Runners were using wearable technology — the Nike chip was the first type of wearable technology. They were not going on their runs if they forgot their device at home,” Ferber said.

“So [I realized] these devices are changing behaviour of these athletes.”

Close to a decade later, Ferber revealed Monday the University of Calgary has received funding from the federal government in the form of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) CREATE grant to train 80 graduate students over the next six years to become experts in the field of wearable technology — which has exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Smart shoes are here to take your running to the next level. Innovative wearable companies are focused on incorporating technology into the realm of fitness. From measuring athletic performance to charging portable devices, smart shoes represent convenience, elegance and comfort for your feet. We´ve collected 5 of the hottest smart shoes on the market today. Read on…

Equipped with USB-C, voice assistants, and better batteries, 2018’s wireless headphones kick 2017’s butt

software

This week, Garmin unveiled a new feature in their Vivosmart 4 fitness tracker intended to set the device apart: a “body battery” that can estimate energy levels and provide insight into how stress, workouts, and sleep are affecting them. It doesn’t actually present anything new on the hardware side, but the updated software behind the body battery has a few useful updates that are worth taking a closer look at.

The innovation behind the body battery comes from the analytics team at Firstbeat Technologies Oy, a Finland-based company that provides analysis programs that allow 32 different Garmin sensors to make sense of all those heartbeats. For anyone familiar with Garmin’s triathlon or running watches, Firstbeat is the company responsible for Garmin’s existing “recovery advisor” (which estimates how many hours you’ll need to feel recovered after a workout) and All-day Stress tracking analysis.

The technology and heart rate science behind the All-day Stress tracker and the new Body Battery are nearly identical.

“The bleachers are on your right. The white line’s up ahead. Keep pushing!” Jennifer Conroyd calls out to me and the 30 or so other runners she’s coaching through an interval workout. We finish our hard effort, finally easing up when Conroyd prompts, “jog it out!”

She’s not just shouting out the directions for motivation: She needs to give these verbal cues, because in reality, the only track visible is the one she’s drawn on a whiteboard propped up next to her. My fellow athletes and I are sprinting side-by-side, without actually going anywhere at all.

On a beautiful summer morning, we’re indoors, our blue flotation belts tethered to lane lines in the pool at WEST Superior Training in Willowbrook, Illinois. The session, Fluid Running Athletics, is designed to emulate a track workout. Submerged from the neck down, we forgo the impact of hitting the ground, instead pumping our arms and legs against the resistance of the deep water—800 times denser than air, Conroyd reminds us.

It’s this reduction in impact that can help extend your running life, she says.

… Bates and his students began looking at how to improve the security of the fitness websites. They suggested a surprisingly simple fix: Rather than placing a circle indicating a range of possible starting locations with the center directly over a person’s actual starting point, allow the system to randomly select an offset point and place the circle over it.

“This gives you geo-indistinguishability, or the likelihood that a user’s home will fall at any point within the circle,” Bates said.

He found that method reduced the certainty of finding the exact starting location of a workout from 95 percent to between 30 and 45 percent.

“That’s a very real impact for people’s safety,” Bates said.

hardware

The purpose of this study was to establish GENEA (Gravity Estimator of Normal Everyday Activity) cut-points for discriminating between six relative-intensity activity levels in middle-aged recreational marathoners. Nighty-eight (83 males and 15 females) recreational marathoners, aged 30–45 years, completed a cardiopulmonary exercise test running on a treadmill while wearing a GENEA accelerometer on their non-dominant wrist. The breath-by-breath V̇O2 data was also collected for criterion measure of physical activity categories (sedentary, light, moderate, vigorous, very vigorous and extremely vigorous). GENEA cut-points for physical activity classification was performed via Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis. Spearman’s correlation test was applied to determine the relationship between estimated and measured intensity classifications. Statistical analysis were done for all individuals, and separating samples by sex. The GENEA cut-points established were able to distinguish between all six-relative intensity levels with an excellent classification accuracy (area under the ROC curve (AUC) values between 0.886 and 0.973) for all samples. When samples were separated by sex, AUC values were 0.881–0.973 and 0.924–0.968 for males and females, respectively. The total variance in energy expenditure explained by GENEA accelerometer data was 78.50% for all samples, 78.14% for males, and 83.17% for females. In conclusion, the wrist-worn GENEA accelerometer presents a high capacity of classifying the intensity of physical activity in middle-aged recreational marathoners when examining all samples together, as well as when sample set was separated by sex. This study suggests that the triaxial GENEA accelerometers (worn on the non-dominant wrist) can be used to predict energy expenditure for running activities.

RunScribe Plus V3I’ve recently received a new, modified version of RunScribe Plus pods.

They look identical to the originally released V3 pods and indeed still show up as a V3 pod on the RunScribe app. However the main hardware ‘fix’ is with the signal strength.

gear

… After nine rounds of development, engineers cracked the code. By using a special thermoplastic polyurethane coating, the midsole’s foam is prohibited from expanding horizontally, returning energy directly back to the runner. The result of this discovery is Brooks’ DNA AMP midsole, an engineered compound that provides exceptional energy return as well as an eye-catching chrome-like finish that looks as good as it feels.

“We set out to create a more amplified experience with the Levitate. Therefore, we pushed for innovation beyond our traditional foam compounds,” says Caprara.

materials

… Earlier this year, Professor Sadoway published results of his new battery technology, using liquid metal, in Nature, the world’s preeminent science journal. “The battery, based on electrodes made of sodium and nickel chloride and using a new type of metal mesh membrane, could be used for grid-scale installations to make intermittent power sources such as wind and solar capable of delivering reliable baseload electricity,” MIT’s press release noted. It’s certainly an innovative idea, and one that Sadoway believes could lead us into a new era of sustainable energy storage.

“I consider this a breakthrough,” Sadoway said in the release, “because for the first time in five decades, this type of battery — whose advantages include cheap, abundant raw materials, very safe operational characteristics, and an ability to go through many charge-discharge cycles without degradation — could finally become practical.”

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from our smartphones to our cars. But one of their most promising replacements is lithium-oxygen batteries, which in theory could store 10 times more power. The only problem: They fall apart after just a handful of charging cycles. Now, researchers have found that running them at high temperatures—along with a couple of other fixes—can push them to at least 150 cycles. Although they would be too hot to handle in phones, lithium-oxygen batteries the size of rail cars could one day underpin a green energy grid, storing excess wind and solar power and delivering it on demand.

“This is very encouraging,” says Yang Shao-Horn, a chemical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge who was not involved in the work. But she and others caution that the new batteries must prove themselves over many more cycles before they’ll be considered for the mass market.

stories

Parks are doing what they can to keep the nation’s natural treasures safe for future generations — and out of your car’s trunk.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School say they have ended a 40-year-quest for the elusive identity of the sensor protein responsible for hearing and balance.

The results of their research, reported Aug. 22 in Neuron, reveal that TMC1, a protein discovered in 2002, forms a sound- and motion-activated pore that allows the conversion of sound and head movement into nerve signals that travel to the brain — a signaling cascade that enables hearing and balance.

Scientists have long known that when the delicate cells in our inner ears detect sound and movement, they convert them into signals. Where and how this conversion occurs has been the subject of intense scientific debate. No more, the authors say.

“The search for this sensor protein has led to numerous dead ends, but we think this discovery ends the quest,” said David Corey, co-senior author on the study and Bertarelli Professor of Translational Medical Science at Harvard Medical School.

… “You can either share a picture of yourself standing on a really cool summit and say, ‘Oh look, a really cool summit,’ or you can post that same picture and say, ‘Did you know that the Land and Water Conservation Fund supports our public lands with $900 million in potential funding each year? But it’s expiring on September 30, so we need you to take action,’” she said. “And then your pretty mountain picture just ended up getting a thousand signatures on a really important issue.”

Not all outdoor influencers share Boué’s passion for activism, but with the growth of their platforms in recent years, many have been pulled into the growing debate about responsible social media usage in nature.

On the one hand, there’s the notion that posting content on the outdoors inspires others to get outside (see: #OptOutside, et al.). On the other, there’s the very real fear that posting photos of hidden hikes and hot springs invites an influx of visitors these places lack the resources to handle.

“If it’s broke, fix it!” is a Patagonia company motto, and the company takes the motto seriously. It has operated a recycling and repair program, Worn Wear, in various permutations since 2005.

In its Reno, Nev., service center, Patagonia operates the country’s largest outdoor gear-repair shop. During the 2017 fiscal year, it made 50,295 clothing repairs.

Josh Schill, the repairs department manager, oversees 69 full-time employees working at 48 industrial sewing machines on a mezzanine in the natural-light-filled warehouse. Many employees in the repair area grow plants, which thrive under the extra task lighting at their stations.

Fourteen employees are deployed to replace zippers, which accounted for 30,000 of last year’s repairs.

biking

Mountain bikes are getting lighter and lighter – in the future, even with spokes made of high-tech fibers. Here you can find even more exciting MTB trends for 2019, like the new Shimano drive.

In 2010, Chris and Melissa Bruntlett sold their cars and began transporting their family of four around Vancouver, BC, by bike. They noticed that bicyclists’ stories were not being told, so they started blogging about their carless lifestyle at the website of what would become their creative agency, Modacity.

Through cycling circles, they heard stories and saw pictures of cycling in Dutch cities, so they went to the Netherlands to check it out, visiting five cities to study cycling infrastructure, talk with local leaders, and share pictures, videos, and articles.

They ended up gathering enough material for a book, which was released Tuesday from Island Press: Building the Cycling City: The Dutch Blueprint for Urban Vitality. It’s a tour of Dutch bicycling culture that attempts to extract lessons that can be applied to other cities, including, yes, American cities.

I chatted with the Bruntletts by phone earlier this month about everything from how the Dutch have taken the concept of the protected bike lane and applied it to the intersection to the amazing Dutch cycling skills courses for kids. We even covered why the right wing in the Netherlands has to support more spending on cycling.

data

Carbohydrate (CHO) availability is fundamental for high-intensity endurance performance, contributing over 80% of the total energy expenditure via both muscle glycogen (~60%) and blood glucose (~20%) oxidation when working at intensities of 80% V̇O2max and above.

The body’s finite CHO stores (~500 g) can sustain high-intensity endurance exercise for ~90 min. Therefore, the body aims to spare this limited CHO supply where possible and utilize fat substrates during submaximal exercise.

High-fat or ketogenic diets increase the utilization of fat substrates during prolonged, submaximal exercise but impair carbohydrate metabolism. Current evidence demonstrates that high-fat diets impair exercise economy and do not improve high-intensity performance.

… Being more physically active also remains the number one stated reason for using a wearable, with 54 percent of users citing that reason in 2017. Forty percent used a wearable to lose weight, 24 percent to sleep better, and 18 percent to manage stress. All of those were up from 2016 except stress management, which was actually a drop.

Modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people!

That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of millions of people, all over the world. The result: the biggest set of heart-rate data ever collected.

Fitbit also knows these people’s ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns. In combination with the heart data, the result is a gold mine of revelations about human health.