For the last two months I’ve been happily listening to music while I’m running. And finally, now you can too.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t listen to music before that point. Certainly I had plenty of devices that supported music while running, including Garmin ones. But at the end of the day I’m a huge Spotify user, and as such – that’s what I’m gonna leverage for music. Being 2018, I’m well beyond the days of loading individual music files to my watch. And the other two streaming platforms on Garmin just weren’t my cup of tea.
But as of today, now you can stream Spotify music to your Garmin watch. Assuming you’ve got a Garmin watch that supports music that is. As of today, October 3rd at 5PM US Eastern Time, that happens to be the Fenix 5 Plus series. Of course, Garmin also makes the Forerunner 645 Music and Vivoactive 3 Music devices. Neither of those watches support Spotify as of 5PM today. But more on that in a moment.
… Colleagues and I have conducted three different qualitative studies with Australians aged from 18 to 75 years old about their use of wearables and smartphone apps for health and fitness.
The first study involved ten male and eight female cyclists who used digital devices to monitor their rides. The second study included 40 people (split evenly by gender) who were self-tracking for any purpose. The final study involved 55 women using a range of digital health technologies.
The research revealed some of the key reasons people use wearables and health apps, and why they give them up.
… The Apple Watch, a new version of which was announced at the event, was initially pitched, in 2014, as a salve for the excesses of your iPhone. Just as Apple had lost control of its iPhone to the invasive, distracting internet companies, those customers had lost control over their own experiences. The Apple Watch — with its smaller screen and emphasis on checking rather than interacting — was pitched with marketing that evoked adventure, activity and, above all, escape, as much from work or home as from the iPhone itself.
Four years and millions of sales later, the Apple-Watch-as-iPhone-antidote pitch remains, as do its use cases as fitness and health devices. More important is what hasn’t yet happened. Whether by accident or by design, the watch has so far been immune to the runaway success that redefined the iPhone. Apple is still in the process — and still in charge — of guessing what most people could get out of an Apple Watch. It’s a device that is neither a simple reflection of pre-emptive market research nor a product reshaped by its own popularity. What future it may have still belongs to Apple. And this appears to be making the company anxious.
Boston-based Nix Biosensors recently won the grand prize at the third-annual Sports & Fitness Industry Association’s (SFIA) Start-Up Challenge, held in Denver on Sept. 26. The company received a $15,000 check via Black Lab Sports and an all-expense-paid trip to visit the Under Armour Innovation Team.
Nix’s award-winning product is a single-use patch that monitors sweat rate and electrolyte loss to support hydration management while running or exercising.
As electronics decrease in size and increase in flexibility, it’s becoming harder and harder to power them. Now, a team in Japan has married a tiny, effective solar cell to a flexible biosensor to create a heartbeat monitor that powers itself.
It’s the latest work from Takao Someya’s team at the Riken Center for Emergent Matter Science in Saitama, Japan, building on their library of ultraflexible, washable, and breathable wearable sensors. As if that were not impressive enough, the sensors are pretty, too: Some resemble sleek gold tattoos, others pulse with green and red LED lights.
The new self-powering feature, described last week in the journal Nature, solves a problem the team first confronted years ago: How does one maintain a steady power supply without cords?
The last time you had your blood pressure checked, it was probably at a doctor’s office with a bulky cuff wrapped around your arm. One day soon, perhaps, you will just need a simple stick-on patch on your neck, no bigger than a postage stamp.
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That’s the goal of Sheng Xu and his team at the University of California, San Diego, who are working on a patch that can continuously measure someone’s central blood pressure—the pressure of blood coursing beyond your aorta, the artery in your heart that delivers blood to all the different parts of the body. It could make it a lot easier to monitor heart conditions and keep an eye on other vital organs like the liver, lungs, and brain.
The silicon elastomer patch works by sending out ultrasonic waves that penetrate the skin and reflect off the wearer’s tissues and blood. Those reflections are sent back to the sensor, and then to a laptop that processes the blood pressure data (for now, at least, the patch must be wired to a laptop and a power source, too). It is the first known wearable device that can sense deep below the surface of the skin.
Scientists at the Riken, a major Japanese research institute, and University of Tokyo have developed a remarkable ambient light-powered cardiac monitor that looks like a transparent bandage. The underlying technology makes possible other flexible body-worn sensors that don’t need to have an external electric source powering them, including temperature and sweat sensors. Because power is supplied directly from a built-in photovoltaic cell, the noise in the electronics is kept to a minimum, allowing for high-precision measurements.
… Your conference theme this year is ‘Decline of HealthCare, the Rise of LifeCare.’ What do you mean by that?
Connected devices, apps, and services change the focus from “healthcare”—which is primarily concerned with dealing with the sick—to “lifecare,” which is keeping everyone well, motivating a consistent set of informed behaviors, where individuals have access and control over information and services. Because, through the use of connected devices, brick-and-mortar health care delivery is no longer the dominant mode. It also forces us all to modify our identities as physicians, hospital systems, solution providers, and patients.
Psychology Today, OSU Ross Center for Brain Health and Performance from
Proponents of wearables that track the links between brain activity and bodily well-being tout their potential in helping improve overall health. At the recent Brain Health and Performance Summit, presented by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Neuroscience Research Institute and The Stanley D. and Joan H. Ross Center for Brain Health and Performance, experts discussed how wearables are currently being used for health and performance monitoring.
Devices that monitor basic health indicators are widely available—most smartphones can track the number of daily steps taken and estimate caloric burn with surprising accuracy. “We’re now used to measuring ourselves and monitoring ourselves,” Josh Hagen, Ph.D., MS, the director of the Human Performance Innovation Center at West Virginia University explained. “Now we can actually measure physiology in real time, and we can get a lot more insights from day to day.”
In the world of digital health, Silicon Valley-based Mindstrong stands out. It has a star-studded team and tens of millions in venture capital funding, including from Jeff Bezos’ VC firm.
It also has a captivating idea: that its app, based on cognitive functioning research, can help detect troubling mental health patterns by collecting data on a person’s smartphone usage — how quickly they type or scroll, for instance.
The promise of that technology has helped Mindstrong build incredible momentum since it launched last year; already more than a dozen counties in California have agreed to deploy the company’s app to patients.
Does the app live up to its promise? There’s no way to tell.
Despite the progress made in personalised nutrition (PN) and the development of services offered to the consumer, the sector is still considered in its infancy with a number of issues, primarily privacy and regulatory, which need to be clarified in order for the industry to advance to the next level.
… Much has been written about the woes women have when it comes to finding outdoor gear that fits and functions. So why does poor fit persist, especially when it comes to outdoor gear for women? Journalist Hannah Weinberger dug into this question in an exposé published on Medium about women’s outdoor gear for the outdoors. She writes: “When companies have made adjustments between their men’s and women’s offerings, it has often been to the detriment of female consumers, specifically when it comes to hard goods and high-performance clothing, experts say. That’s because historically, some manufacturers have conflated ‘women’s gear’ with ‘gear for beginners.’”
Thankfully, this is starting to change. One company that is doing women’s mountain bike apparel right is Wild Rye, named one of the bike industry’s hottest designers by Bicycling Magazine. Several years ago, co-founders Katy Hover-Smoot and Cassie Abel bonded over the need for well-designed ski and mountain bike apparel for women—and not just for super athletes, but for women who have desk jobs and ride bikes recreationally with their friends. In response, they launched Wild Rye in 2016. Their specialties are ski base layers and mountain bike chamois and shorts. (Many mountain bikers wear spandex chamois underneath a long pair of shorts.) They mix fun prints with technical, durable materials, like the Freel bike shorts, which come in dinosaur and cactus prints with four-way-stretch, abrasion-resistant nylon. Most importantly, Wild Rye’s fit addresses the qualms women like me have been griping about for years. Their shorts are long and loose through the legs. And their Sandia jersey is long-sleeved with mesh panels for cooling. It’s a snug fit that wicks sweat, but it’s still long enough that you don’t have to worry about exposing your backside.
Choosing the right running shoe has never been easy. There are so many shoe companies and so many models, each touting various high-tech features. How is a buyer supposed to make the smartest choice?
Now is the season to figure it out. With cross-country in full swing and the year’s most popular marathons and half-marathons just weeks away, lots of runners are looking for new footwear. Fortunately — almost amazingly — many experts believe shoe-buying is getting simpler. You don’t need a computer algorithm. You’ll probably fare best by trusting your sense of feel.
When it comes to gaining strength, muscles are only part of the equation. “It’s crucial to pay attention to your tendons and ligaments, too,” says Jakob Roze, a Tier 2 trainer at Equinox West 50th Street in New York City. “They connect muscle to bone, and if they’re not strong enough they can restrict your movement and make you more prone to injury.”
These fibrous cords are made mostly of collagen, a structural protein that accounts for about a third of all the proteins in the body. By stimulating collagen production, you can bolster your muscles’ support system. Below are five simple strategies.
A new type of battery developed by researchers at MIT could be made partly from carbon dioxide captured from power plants. Rather than attempting to convert carbon dioxide to specialized chemicals using metal catalysts, which is currently highly challenging, this battery could continuously convert carbon dioxide into a solid mineral carbonate as it discharges.
While still based on early-stage research and far from commercial deployment, the new battery formulation could open up new avenues for tailoring electrochemical carbon dioxide conversion reactions, which may ultimately help reduce the emission of the greenhouse gas to the atmosphere.
The battery is made from lithium metal, carbon, and an electrolyte that the researchers designed. The findings are described today in the journal Joule, in a paper by assistant professor of mechanical engineering Betar Gallant, doctoral student Aliza Khurram, and postdoc Mingfu He.
The inability to alter intrinsic piezoelectric behavior in organic polymers hampers their application in flexible, wearable and biocompatible devices, according to researchers at Penn State and North Carolina State University, but now a molecular approach can improve those piezoelectric properties.
“Morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) is an important concept developed a half-century ago in ceramic materials,” said Qing Wang, professor of materials science and engineering. “This concept has never before been realized in organic materials.”
The concept of morphotropic phase boundary refers to significant changes in material properties that occur at the boundary between crystalline structures, and are dependent on a material’s composition.
It’s the first thing someone usually says when you’re writhing in agony after stubbing your toe really, really hard and are wondering if it might be broken. “Can you move it? In that case, you haven’t broken it.”
In fact, you can sometimes move a broken bone, so this is not one of the main signs to look for when deciding whether you have a fracture. The top three symptoms of a broken bone are pain, swelling and deformity. If a bone is sticking out at 90 degrees or poking through the skin, not surprisingly, that’s not a good sign and it might well be broken. Another sign is if you heard a snap when the accident happened…
University College London, UCL Sainsbury Wellcome Centre Blog from
Dexterous movements are at the pinnacle of motor control and are likely to be performed by a diverse set of neural circuits. In the following interview, Dr Adam Hantman outlines how his lab is attempting to identify and understand the neural elements responsible for dexterous motor control.
Sweat sensing may provide a noninvasive means of estimating blood biomarker levels if a number of technological hurdles can be overcome. This report describes progress on a physiologically-based transport model relating sweat glucose and key electrolyte concentrations to those in blood. Iontophoretically-stimulated sweat glucose and fasted blood glucose were simultaneously measured in two healthy human subjects. Sweat glucose was measured with a novel, prototype skin sweat collection/analysis system and blood glucose with a commercial fingerstick glucometer. These data, in combination with data from three published studies, were used to calibrate a dynamic mathematical model for glucose transport and uptake in human skin, followed by extraction into sweat. Model simulations revealed that experimental and literature sweat glucose values were well represented under varying physiologic conditions. The glucose model, calibrated under a variety of experimental conditions including electrical enhancement, revealed a 10 min blood-to-sweat lag time and a sweat/blood glucose level ranging from 0.001 to 0.02, depending on sweat rate. These values are consistent with those reported in the literature. The developed model satisfactorily described the sweat-to-blood relationship for glucose concentrations measured under different conditions in four human studies including the present pilot study. The algorithm may be used to facilitate sweat biosensor development.
The weight that soldiers are required to carry in training and in combat has continually increased over the years. Changes in load carried or pace of activity will alter the physiological and biomechanical stress associated with the activity. Whether it is part of the soldier’s training or an actual operation, managing the proper load and speed to minimize fatigue can be integral to the soldier’s success. Without a proper understanding of the multitude of factors that may affect load carriage performance, mission success may be jeopardized. The purpose of this review is to summarize and clarify the findings of load carriage research and to propose a new method for analyzing the intensity of load carriage tasks, the Load-Speed Index. Materials and Methods:
We reviewed studies that examined military load carriage at walking speeds and included articles that featured non-military participants as deemed necessary. Results:
Major factors that can affect load carriage performance, such as speed of movement, load carried, load placement, body armor, and environmental extremes all influence the soldier’s energy expenditure. A critical aspect of load carriage performance is determining the appropriate combination of speed and load that will maximize efficiency of the activity. At the higher end of walking speeds, the walk-to-run transition represents a potential problem of efficiency, as it may vary on an individual or population basis. Conclusions:
This review provides a comprehensive overview of these factors and suggests a new Load-Speed Index, which can be utilized to define thresholds for load and speed combinations and contribute to the understanding of the physiological and biomechanical demands of load carriage marches. The literature recommends that load and speed should be managed in order to maintain an exercise intensity ~45% VO2 max to delay time to fatigue during prolonged marches, and the Load-Speed Index corroborated this finding, identifying 47% VO2 max as a threshold above which intensity increases at a greater rate with increases in load and speed. The Load-Speed Index requires validation as a predictive tool. There are no definitive findings as to how load affects the speed at which the walk-to-run transition occurs, as no investigations have specifically examined this interaction. Additional research is clearly needed by examining a wide range of loads that will facilitate a clearer understanding of speed and load combinations that optimize marching pace and reduce energy expenditure.
Many fitness trackers are not accurate at measuring heart rate, and can backfire when it comes to weight loss. It’s easy enough to cheat with fitness devices, but John Hancock isn’t worried about that either. “These programs are going to be in place for an average of 20 years and often much longer,” Tingle says, “and while people might figure out a way to get more steps in the short term, people aren’t going to do that for two decades.”
Though the program is optional, experts worry that it’ll change down the line. “At this stage, they’re saying it’s voluntary,” Ann Cavoukian, who served as Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner until 2014 told CBC.”My gut says over time it’s not going to be voluntary, or it will be less voluntary, or there will be consequences for not doing it. Like you’ll pay higher premiums because … you’re not willing to share that data. That’s what disturbs me.” (For his part, Tingle stresses that it’s important “the customer has total choice about whether they participate.”)
Another worry is that this will fundamentally change how we measure our lives, according to Dan Bouk, a historian at Colgate University.