Many of us, even those who aren’t professional athletes or trained commandos, walk around with some sort of wearable technology, from the Apple Watch to the Fitbit, that measures everything from our heart rate to our steps to how we sleep. But the world of wearables is much vaster, and the future of the technologies involved much brighter. The Social Brain Blog interviewed James Onate, Ph.D., a researcher at The Ohio State University who discusses how wearables are being used and the emerging ethical dilemmas.
… Once considered quite niche, since Fitbit released the Ace children’s wearables have become more and more popular. Although there are no official figures on activity tracker sales for kids,
Gartner predicts wearable device sales will grow 26 percent in 2019 and acknowledges children’s devices are now a key segment of the market.
Wired A great price for a high-functioning Garmin. Detailed fitness tracking. Both long- and short-term training analyses. Light and comfortable. Compatible with Android and iOS, and accepts a wide array of accessories. Can store and play up to 500 songs. Tired If you’re under 30, loading podcasts on a watch feels ridiculous. You need to be carrying your phone to access the safety features.
This week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple executive Kevin Lynch announced multiple updates to WatchOS, the operating system that powers the company’s smartwatch. (Voice memos, a calculator, streaming audio, oh my!) But the most telling features were the new additions to the watch’s suite of health-monitoring tools.
Beginning this fall, Apple Watch will track your activity trends over time, help protect your hearing by alerting you to harmful levels of ambient noise, and allow users to track their menstrual cycles. Individually, these improvements might look small or trivial. But given the watch’s existing health and fitness features, this new bundle of capabilities underscores Apple’s push to make its smartwatch the control center for your personal health. Sure, calculating a tip from your wrist is neat. But a personal companion that monitors your well-being everywhere you go? That, Apple is betting, is the future.
There probably never will be a perfect football helmet. That doesn’t mean manufacturers won’t chase that goal.
A tour of the Riddell headquarters makes that absolutely clear. Innovation, imagination, analytics, all with advancements in the product and enhancements of player safety as the objective.
Those advancements have occurred in this century at varied paces. Some improvements have developed over a period of years, while others — particularly nowadays with so many steps forward in technology and analytics — happened rapidly and will continue to do so.
… This year Therm-a-Rest released a new sleeping mat: the NeoAir Uberlite. In the past, the NeoAir XLite was a popular, consistently award-winning sleeping pad because of its unrivaled combination of low weight, small packed size, and high R-value. With the introduction of the UberLite, Therm-a-Rest has created something even smaller and lighter, almost mind-bendingly so.
… “When you come inside, remove your clothing, and you should throw them in the washing machine right away, and at that point, you should do a tick check,” said Dr. Alan Taege, with Cleveland Clinic.
The 2019 IMPERVIUS, the first Bitumen Waterproofing Membranes Conference, which took place in Baveno, Italy on 5-6 June, attracted 93 key players from 61 different companies and 24 countries. Presentations focused on raw material development, processes, development in the MENA region, regulation and environmental opportunities.
Four years ago, fewer than a million units of smart clothing shipped worldwide; today, it is predicted that global sales will total US$ 1.18 billion by 2025 as the Internet of Things expands to connect more than 75 billion devices.
DuPont had been making flexible circuitry for decades, but manufacturers wanted electronics in clothing to stretch, snap back to size and survive exposure to the elements. The introduction of DuPont brand Intexar, an electronic ink and film that transforms fabric into smart clothing, kicked off a cascade of innovative ideas for multiple applications including fitness gear, heated garments, and wearable health care.
University of Massachusetts Amherst, News & Media Relations from
A major factor holding back development of wearable biosensors for health monitoring is the lack of a lightweight, long-lasting power supply. Now scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst led by materials chemist Trisha L. Andrew report that they have developed a method for making a charge-storing system that is easily integrated into clothing for “embroidering a charge-storing pattern onto any garment.”
As Andrew explains, “Batteries or other kinds of charge storage are still the limiting components for most portable, wearable, ingestible or flexible technologies. The devices tend to be some combination of too large, too heavy and not flexible.”
Their new method uses a micro-supercapacitor and combines vapor-coated conductive threads with a polymer film, plus a special sewing technique to create a flexible mesh of aligned electrodes on a textile backing. The resulting solid-state device has a high ability to store charge for its size, and other characteristics that allow it to power wearable biosensors.
In May, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk shared a video of a man with one leg flipping a skateboard with his crutches while clearing a gap across the street from Owenhouse Cycling in downtown Bozeman.
“Best 360 flip you’ll see today,” Hawk wrote.
Hawk’s video of the Bozemanite went viral. It had nearly 1.3 million views and almost 180,000 likes as of Friday morning.
What’s the most abundant protein found in the body? It’s collagen! Our bones, muscles, skin, and tendons are built from this protein. When we don’t have enough collagen running through our system, the structures can become weak and break down. Since collagen production declines with age, it’s important to find ways to increase our levels to keep our bodies healthy and functioning efficiently. Collagen supplements can have a ton of benefits for everyone, but especially athletes or people who are active.
… “You can only get so much out of your body, but if you treat it properly you’ll get the most out of it,” Meltzer says, adding that treating your body properly often means runners need to learn how to relax. “I developed a better attitude about running as I got older. I realized that I’m a better runner when I’m doing what I enjoy. I like to be in the mountains and run up 3,000 vertical feet, so that’s how I train.”
According to Meltzer, if masters runners need to change anything as they age, it’s in their mindset. Don’t be so hard on yourself. “Take it as it is. Enjoy it. Don’t get stressed about losing your speed in your forties,” he says. “Just enjoy what the decade brings you.”
… This year’s field is arguably the best in history, with numerous past champions, including 2018 winner Ted King and 2017 champ Alison Tetrick, lining up alongside current WorldTour pros like EF Education First teammates Taylor Phinney, Alex Howes, and Lachlan Morton, and Trek-Segafredo cohorts Peter Stetina and Kiel Reijnen. If course conditions remain prime—and it looks like they will, thanks to a favorable forecast—it’s possible we’ll see the first-ever finish in under 10 hours. (Last year’s men’s winning time was 10:44, while the top woman came home in 12:09.)
But for most of the field, who gained entry through a highly competitive lottery process, simply finishing will be a significant enough goal. To do so, they’ll need to grind their way around the course and back to the finish in Emporia by no later than 3 a.m. on Sunday. Many will need most or all of the 21 available hours; others will miss the official cutoff, but still finish the ride
REI just launched a pilot program with The Pro’s Closet to exchange bikes in the Denver market. Could the new program signal a shift in how consumers buy, sell, and trade used bikes?
Garmin announced Advanced Sleep Monitoring, an enhanced capability to more accurately identify sleep stages, last June. Developed against truth data generated by a clinical device, the feature is the result of a sleep study by Garmin Health conducted under the supervision of Dr. Suzanne Stevens, Director of the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) Sleep Medicine Clinic with certifications by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the American Board of Sleep Medicine.
Dr. Stevens presented the details of the study on May 7th at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. The poster presentation covered study design, results, and the conclusion that Garmin wearables that support Advanced Sleep Monitoring present a valid method to estimate sleep stages. For consumers this results in valuable insights regarding their sleep hygiene and how their sleep patterns may be affecting their overall health. For researchers the results indicate Garmin wearables may be suitable for longitudinal studies where monitoring participant activity and sleep patterns are desired endpoints.
In this post, we will see how to download personal Fitbit data histories for step counts, heart rate, and sleep via the Fitbit API. We will use a combination of existing R packages and custom calls to the Fitbit API to get all of the data we are interested in.
This post won’t focus on data analysis per se, but rather data collection.
A recent research study, published in the journal Nutrients, found that visitors to a university recreational center were more likely to select a healthier post-exercise snack when the choice was made pre-exercise. R
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is advising people against camping above 4,000 feet in the High Peaks, after a number of instances recently became public on social media.
It’s banned above 4,000 feet from May 1 to December 14. People camping between 3,500 and 4,000 feet need to be in designated campsites.
In southern Nevada, where the Mojave meets the Great Basin Desert, two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service law enforcement officers are responsible for patrolling the entire Desert National Wildlife Refuge complex. Their job comes with a diverse set of responsibilities: enforcing hunting and fishing regulations, stopping park vandalism, and rescuing stranded visitors, among other things. At 1.6 million acres, this is the largest wildlife refuge in the country outside of Alaska, home to over 500 plant species and the desert bighorn sheep, Nevada’s state animal. So why are these two officers being sent hundreds of miles away from the refuge on rotating missions to the U.S.-Mexico Border?
Their deployment is part of a pilot program launched in May of 2018 under then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, described as a “surge operation” meant to help with border security.
The summer travel season gets under way in June with Great Outdoors Month. To encourage visitation on public lands, the Bureau of Land Management will waive recreation-related fees for visitors to agency-managed public lands on June 8, National Get Outdoors Day; Sept. 28, National Public Lands Day; and Nov. 11, Veterans Day.
When it comes to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, nothing beats good old plants and their knack for photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is the process of converting sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into oxygen and the sugars that feed all life on Earth. Ever since photosynthesis was discovered, scientists have been trying to artificially duplicate it. Now a French team thinks they have succeeded, at least on a small scale.
In a discussion of the potential avenues for artificial photosynthesis, science writer Katherine Bourzac notes that at its most basic, photosynthesis aims to convert energy and carbon into fuel. It’s really a form of solar power, sometimes called “wet solar,” for those situations when direct production of electricity is impractical. As Bourzac points out, at current levels of technology most of humanity uses liquid or gas fuel as energy. Until this changes, there need to be ways to produce carbon neutral, or near-neutral, fuels.
… Standard, single-use batteries are found in a bunch of different household objects like TV remotes, toys, and small electronics. They’re the ones you probably recognize the most, and while they are safe to throwing away, they contain parts that are recyclable. As for batteries that aren’t just your standard leave-in-the-drawer alkaline? Little, single-use batteries like those from watches, calculators, or hearing aids can also be recycled! We recommend taking advantage of Recycling Search Center on Earth911.com, where you can search for the specific battery you’d like to recycle and find a drop-off location near you.
Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has adapted laser-induced graphene (LIG) into small, metal-free devices that generate electricity. Like rubbing a balloon on hair, putting LIG composites in contact with other surfaces produces static electricity that can be used to power devices.