Suunto introduces new variants of Suunto 9, its flagship lineup of multisport GPS watches, and Suunto 3 Fitness, the training watch for active lifestyle. The new variants include a top-of-the-line Suunto 9 model, with a robust titanium bezel and chiseled, triangular strap pattern, as well as three streamlined variants in black, white and lime. The Suunto 3 Fitness collection grows with two new designs, burgundy and copper, as well as a software update that introduces two new training programs.
Apple today introduced Apple Watch Series 4, redesigned and re-engineered to help users stay connected, be more active and manage their health in powerful new ways. While retaining the original iconic design, the fourth-generation Apple Watch has been refined, combining new hardware and software enhancements into a genuinely singular, unified form. The stunning display is over 30 percent larger and seamlessly integrates into the thinner, smaller case, while the new interface provides more information with richer detail. Apple Watch Series 4 with watchOS 5 brings advanced activity and communications features, along with revolutionary health capabilities, including a new accelerometer and gyroscope, which are able to detect hard falls, and an electrical heart rate sensor that can take an electrocardiogram (ECG) using the new ECG app,1 which has been granted a De Novo classification by the FDA.
Garmin is known for pushing the limits on size and packing everything it can into its Fenix GPS multisport watches. The story hasn’t changed in 2018 with the new Fenix 5X Plus, which is one of the largest fitness watches on the market — and has a features list longer than Al Capone’s rap sheet. If you want it all, the Fenix 5X Plus is the watch for you.
It’s not all roses, though. The Fenix 5X Plus is not only the biggest fitness watch you’ll wear, it is likely one of the most expensive with a starting price tag of $850. Do the abundant features justify the expense? Let’s dig into the details to find out.
Polar announced two new workout trackers today: the more expensive Vantage V and the cheaper Vantage M companion. Let’s start with the bigger, more expensive watch. The Vantage V costs $499.90 and includes a new optical heart rate sensor with nine LEDs along two different wavelengths (green and red). This, the company says, should make its heart rate readings more accurate.
The biggest addition to the watch is its power measurements for running.
Let’s ignore for now whether Apple’s new watch really is the first direct-to-consumer ECG (It’s not.) The bigger question is whether it’s a good idea in the first place. Healthcare providers usually use ECGs in hospitals to measure the heart’s electrical activity and detect abnormalities in its rhythm. But with the latest iteration of its smartwatch, Apple wants to put an ECG on your wrist that you can use “anytime, anywhere.”
It sounds like a great idea in theory. Even Ivor Benjamin, president of the American Heart Association, showed up to give Apple props. “The AHA is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives,” Benjamin said on stage Wednesday. “Products that seek to provide deeper health insights, like the Apple Watch Series 4, offer great potential in getting us there.”
People with atrial fibrillation, which the CDC estimates affects between 2.7 and 6.1 million Americans, could likely benefit from a wearable, on-demand ECG device like the new Apple Watch. (AFib is the most common arrhythmia, and the only kind Apple’s watch is approved to detect.) But for everyone else, evidence suggests the potential costs could actually outweigh the proposed benefits. Despite what Benjamin says, there is such a thing as too much insight into one’s health.
… As we’ve said, smartwatches are well suited for bringing essential medical monitoring into the home – they’re easy to use, they’re always running, and they’re always in contact with our bodies. In many ways they’re the ultimate medical sensor.
“One of the biggest hurdles of digital health is acceptance and engagement and this is where the smartwatch shines,” says Rosario Iannella, co-founder and CTO at Qardio, which makes blood pressure monitors that work with mobile devices like the Apple Watch.
“It is shifting the idea of health as something only done at a doctor’s office or a gym to something that can be done wherever you are.”
The work to tap into this potential continues, with institutions like the Centre for Body Computing (CBC) at the University of Southern California investigating how wearables and health monitoring can work – from the way data is collected to the way it’s processed.
AirPods are a fan favorite, but what will the second generation look like? AppleInsider looks towards the future to find out what we expect to see in AirPods 2.0 and the things we would like to see.
When Czech entrepreneur Robert Hasek began jogging with his dog, Darwin, the three-mile runs were making the bull terrier sick with fatigue. Hasek was surprised, thinking his dog led a healthy lifestyle. To solve the mystery, he strapped a Fitbit to Darwin and discovered he was actually only active in his presence. “Otherwise, he is lying, sleeping and doing nothing. He’s lazy!”
The businessman sensed an opportunity and developed one of the world’s first dog fitness trackers. His product is part of a growing industry of gadgets for pets that include GPS trackers, automatic feeders, ball throwing machines for dogs to fetch, and self-cleaning litter boxes for cats.
When we think about wearable technology, we tend to think about fitness trackers and AR headsets, but wearable technology goes well beyond that. In fact, wearable technology is making a huge impact on healthcare industry with devices such as Continuous Glucose Monitoring, Smart pills, Remote Patient Monitoring etc. Another aspect of healthcare that’s being impacted by wearable technology is rehabilitation. Experts believe wearable technology can be successfully incorporated in clinical rehabilitation. According to the American College of Sports Medicine, wearable technology is the world’s current number one fitness trend. At our WT | Wearable Technologies Show 2018 MEDICA in Dusseldorf November 12-15 we will highlight great thought leaders and innovators from all over the globe. The companies introduced below will exhibit at the upcoming event.
A successful surgery depends on monitoring the patient’s condition after the surgery. It is a common drawback in orthopedic surgery. Consensus Orthopedics aims to solve this problem with their innovation of TracPatch, a groundbreaking wearable device that tracks a patient’s post-surgical activities. With the use of smartphone technology and Internet of Things, TracPatch monitors key patient metrics allowing a surgeon to remotely monitor a patient’s recovery for effective managed care. The patch monitors wound healing through temperate measurement and keeps track of the patient´s activity via smartphone.
Electronic design and firmware consulting is the focus of Voler Systems, which specializes in wearable and Internet of Things (IoT) devices for companies that create medical and consumer products. The company’s expertise spans sensors, wireless communications, power management for battery-operated devices, and medical devices.
Voler Systems recently introduced its universal health-sensor platform, which collects data from people to determine the right type of sensor to use, the right place on the body to wear the sensor, and the best software algorithm to process the sensor data (see figure). It can essentially be described as a pre-engineered prototype device that creates a fast route for a patient’s data to be captured and transmitted. Through its combination of hardware, firmware, and software, the platform facilitates data transmission to a smartphone or the cloud.
Mountain View, California-based AliveCor announced yesterday that its KardiaK Software Platform has been granted Breakthrough Device designation by the FDA.
AliveCor’s software is a neural network trained to read ECG data for elevated levels of blood potassium, a condition known as hyperkalemia that affects the kidneys.
Primarily diagnosed through invasive laboratory blood test, KardiaK would require no blood draws to measure a patient’s blood potassium, and could be performed at home if the user owns a home ECG device (which are also produced by AliveCor).
In some ways, Strava is a very much like any social media platform, albeit with a slightly narrower focus than most. Founded as an online portal for bicycling enthusiasts in 2009, Strava it bills itself as “the social network for athletes,” has taken in $70 million in funding and has “tens of millions of active users,” according to CEO James Quarles.
It is getting very serious about the larger social media play and the ecosystem it hopes to build around it. Quarles is new to his job, having come on board last spring, but he is not new to social media. Before taking over as CEO at Strava, Qualres ran business operations at Instagram, and before that he was at Facebook.
With new leadership, Strava is pushing past its historical capacities — helping athletes track and share data about their workouts with other enthusiasts — and thinking bigger about the entire fitness journey it is attempting to go on with its customers.
It is an effort that is making an impact, particularly in the niche community it serves. According to one InTheBlack reviewer, among exercise enthusiasts who run, swim and bike, Strava isn’t just the place users go to log their athletic activities — it is where they goes to verify they exist.
Optical sensing is one of the most prevalent biosensing techniques and, yet, we have only just begun to leverage its full capability. This article uses a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor to illustrate how an optical sensing system works and discusses possible extensions in new healthcare applications.
What Makes a Biosensor Truly Useful?
To measure a patient’s heart rate, an optical biosensor shines a light into the capillary bed of the patient’s tissue and measures the light that has either traversed or scattered from the tissue. As arterial blood pulsates through capillaries in the tissue, the amount of light it absorbs or scatters changes with each pulse, synchronously to the patient’s heart beat. By observing the variations of light intensity, the optical biosensor can monitor heart rate and other vital signs.
While, at a high level, the principle for optical sensing seems simple, there are a lot of detailed considerations in making a biosensor truly useful.
International sporting goods operation Amer Sports has confirmed this week that it has updated its strategy. The company notes that it will prioritize acceleration in soft goods, business to consumer, China, the United States and digitalization.
Amer Sports’ extensive portfolio of brands includes Salomon, Arc’teryx, Peak Performance, Atomic, Mavic, ENVE, Suunto, Wilson and Precor.
Going forward, the company adds that it… ‘will further drive transformation towards areas of faster growth, higher profitability, and better asset efficiency, first through the integration of the acquired Peak Performance business, and by the choice to focus the portfolio with the decision to place the Mavic cycling business under strategic review.’
Forget the fake Rolex watches sold on street corners. These days, most counterfeits are sold over the Internet, right into your home. And some of them could seriously hurt you.
Take bicycle helmets. If you don’t use one, you probably have a child or relative who does. Bike helmets are meant to protect us if we ever have a serious fall.
But counterfeits won’t provide that protection.
At Specialized Bicycles, they’ve seen the evidence. The headquarters is in Morgan Hill, Calif. — about 30 miles south of Silicon Valley. That’s where Clint Mattacola spends all day testing the company’s bike helmets to make sure they exceed federal safety standards. [audio, 4:16]
ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (AU) from
Researchers have developed a revolutionary method to ‘print’ large-scale sheets of two dimensional piezoelectric material, opening new opportunities for piezo-sensors and energy harvesting.
Importantly, the inexpensive process allows the integration of piezoelectric components directly onto silicon chips.
Until now, no 2D piezoelectric material has been manufactured in large sheets, making it impossible to integrate into silicon chips or use in large-scale surface manufacturing.
This fall, five bold women will compete against their own past performance while running for four days in the desert in Israel. Donna Moderna Negev Adventure, a programme designed to help women challenge their own limits, began in Italy in late June, says event organiser Donna Moderna, the women’s magazine title by leading publisher Mondadori Group.
The event, developed in collaboration with the Israeli National Tourist Office, is for every woman, from the beginning jogger to the experienced racer seeking a bigger challenge. The programme will culminate with an 80-km race in the Negev Desert in Israel from 29 October to 1 November between five finalists wearing garments by French activewear brand BV Sport made with Sensil Innergy Nylon 6.6 performance fabric.
Anyone making a cursory inquiry into the intriguing world of 3D textiles will find that the sector embraces a rather nebulous term leading to an untold number of different routes and a wide array of opportunities. A quick Google search of 3D fabrics, for example, results in somewhere around 325 million hits, which include 3D versions of everything from traditional wovens and knits to nonwovens and non-traditional prints, not to mention an exponentially diverse list of applications, some obvious and others not so much so. An immediate thought surrounding this growing interest is that engineers are finally becoming significantly more comfortable with and accepting of 3D textiles in dynamic performance-based applications. At the same time, product designers continue to become even more adept at creating fabrics or maybe more appropriately fibrous materials, which exhibit these specific technical, visual and/or tactile requirements.
Versatility and clearly defined performance attributes continue to be the prime drivers for interest in 3D textiles. Given that virtually all textile manufacturing technologies can be adapted or modified in some way to create 3D textiles, the breadth of applications is truly almost endless.
Whether it’s because of their nasty habit of carrying diseases like Zika and malaria or just their penchant for being vacation-spoiling jerks, there’s plenty of reasons to hate mosquitos. Fortunately, some of the biggest mosquito haters out there turn out to be some pretty darn smart scientists and engineers.
Thanks to them, there are a whole lot of smart anti-mosquito deterrents on the way that go far beyond the usual bug sprays, rolled-up newspapers, and other off-the-shelf solutions. Read on for six of the amazing technologies that could soon bring us a utopian world free from needle-nosed vampire insects.
Each summer thousands of hikers walk sections of the Pacific Crest Trail that were once in private hands. Over the last 15 years, the federal government has purchased more than 17,000 acres along its path to protect public access to the 2,600-mile route, with money from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The fund uses royalties from offshore oil and gas leasing to purchase private land to improve access to public lands, provide grants to state and local governments for public park projects and pay for conservation efforts on private property.
But at the end of September, the program could stop collecting money if Congress doesn’t renew it. As the clock ticks down on the fund, supporters hope it is renewed as part of one of the spending bills moving through Congress.
The world’s premier surfer has joined forces with wave science geeks to create an artificial wave in the middle of California. Will it revolutionize the sport or destroy the soul of surfing? Yes.
In this post, we will use the Ford GoBike Real-Time System, StreamSets Data Collector, Apache Kafka and MapD to create a real-time data pipeline of bike availability in the Ford GoBike bikeshare ecosystem. We’ll walk through the architecture and configuration that enables this data pipeline and share a simple auto-updating dashboard within MapD Immerse.
In recent years, the 10,000-steps-a-day regime has become entrenched in popular culture. You can barely walk down the street without someone stomping past you wearing a FitBit; when Jeremy Hunt was health secretary, he was often pictured with his poking out from his shirtsleeves. It has become a global obsession: the research firm Gartner recently estimated that by 2020 there will be 500m wearables adorning consumers across the world.
This is all despite the fact that 10,000 steps is a completely arbitrary figure, one that originates from a successful Japanese marketing campaign in the mid-60s. In an attempt to capitalise on the immense popularity of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the company Yamasa designed the world’s first wearable step-counter, a device called a manpo-kei, which translates as “10,000-step meter”.
Two researchers from the University of Washington have found a way to estimate a US city’s obesity level without having to look at its inhabitants.
The duo trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to find the relationship between a city’s infrastructure and obesity levels using satellite and Street View images from Google. By understanding how city planning influences obesity, health campaigns and new construction can be coordinated to improve a city’s health, the researchers wrote in a paper published in JAMA Network Open.