With the vast variety of fitness trackers on the market, it’s hard to know what data is useful. When there’s watches, wristbands, sweatbands and t-shirts to choose from, how do you decide? Jonathan Peake, exercise physiologist at Queensland University of Technology, takes us through it.
Personal health-tracking technologies are gaining popularity: Consumer studies show that 15% of Americans currently use wearable technologies daily and a further 56% wants to monitor their health behavior through such devices (Sanders, 2017). The expanding technology with internet connection, such as my mobile phone, now links even uninformed citizens unintentionally into their net. Having been caught, I am also wondering what are the exact benefits of knowing my step counts. Can there also be unintended consequences when detecting and sharing one’s personal fitness data? The popularity of fitness tracking, or “sensor mania” as Swan (2012) has described it, has also awakened researchers to comment on the use and meaning of these devices in the current health and fitness conscious era.
Two things to know about me – I’m not very good at resting on rest days, or sticking to a plan. In past training schedules I’ve chopped and changed sessions as I went and opted to do high intensity gym classes over letting my legs recover. It’s safe to say, I wasn’t the obvious choice for a feature on training for a marathon listening solely to a running watch. ‘You do realise, if it tells you to take 48 hours off you’ll need to’ my colleagues warned – ‘sure’ I replied, ‘how hard can it be?’
… Instead of having chunky devices that contain lots of physical storage, manufacturers could focus on providing more advanced sensors and better batteries. Wearables could also simply look smaller, sleeker and more fashionable – something that’s particularly relevant in the case of ring or necklace based trackers.
Most wearables are able to track how far you’ve run, your current heart rate, and your location, but all of these features are typically somewhat inaccurate at times.
With more nano sensors built into them, we could benefit from sleek-looking wearables that are also highly accurate, right down to being able to measure body temperature or other vital signs.
Sky Labs is a vital signal big data based preventative healthcare company. They are developing a ring-type Cardio Tracker, CART to detects and monitor atrial fibrillation which is difficult to detect in a hospital. By simply wearing CART on a finger, CART continuously detects atrial fibrillation without any user intervention. Also, their proprietary arrhythmia detection algorithm detects atrial fibrillation and normal sinus rhythm with 98% accuracy.
Wearable fitness devices have become capable of achieving ever greater feats in recent years, but one of the more interesting comes via a stretchy patch that was recently developed by a team from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, which is capable of analyzing our sweat as we exercise.
The work, which was documented in a recently published paper, scours our sweat for a range of organic molecules, such as glucose and lactic acid, which are reliable markers for a range of health indicators. The patch sits on the skin and directs our sweat towards electrodes that are coated in enzymes. These enzymes allow the sensors to then electrically detect low concentrations of various compounds.
… The reason someone chooses a Suunto watch over a Garmin Fenix series watch isn’t because Suunto has more outdoors features or even better accuracy these days (they don’t). It’s because Suunto spends the time to ensure the vast majority of bugs are never seen by customers. Be it hardware or software related issues, the products are just more dependable.
Which isn’t to say these other companies are perfect. Far from it. But this isn’t a post about whataboutism. It’s not about some random bug that Apple, Wahoo, or Polar hasn’t yet fixed. Or Suunto’s site. It’s about the a cultural problem Garmin seems to have around software stability and bugs, that appears to be ‘features first, stability later’.
CEVA has completed qualification testing of its RivieraWaves Bluetooth 5.1 Low Energy IP using the Ellisys Bluetooth Qualifier (EBQ) compliance tester. According to CEVA, RivieraWaves Bluetooth IP platforms provide comprehensive solutions for both Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth dual mode connectivity.
Altra was on the guide-rails train long before Brooks introduced its GuideRails 1.0 back in 2013. The Paradigm, a robust shoe reminiscent of highly cushioned Hoka One Ones, is constructed with recovery in mind, from its stability system down to its Stabilipods, which are located beneath the arch and heel for added support.
… The trip with the Snow Peak firepit was the first time I’d been camping in years without feeling like I was going to lose my mind. My family and I were outside together, enjoying an early-summer evening without stressing out over why the burner on the camp stove wasn’t working, or trying to keep the toddler from wandering off and falling into a hornet nest.
The firepit is versatile, durable, and reliable. It folds down flat for storage in your car, so it doesn’t take up valuable space that you need for six billion different stuffed animals. Then it unfolds into an elegant metal basket—no tinkering, no complicated setup. It has a grill top, so you can put your already-skewered chicken skewers over the coals while watching your 4-year-old learn how to play cornhole with a nearby group of young adults, who will all come over at different times to tell you how adorable she is.
… At the forthcoming Red Bull X-Alps adventure race which starts on June 16, Jean-Baptiste Chandelier will help to introduce the prototype of a new Porcher Sport fabric, Skytex 21, weighing just 21gsm, that will ensure he and other extreme paragliders soon enjoy an even greater sense of weightlessness.
The 2019 published DIN SPEC 60015 “Quantitative measurement of the evaporative heat loss of smart textile materials for work, sports/outdoor and leisure” defines the measuring procedure and requirements for textiles and clothing that claim to have a cooling effect. This already offers a market compliant standard. The next stage is to convert the method into an ISO standard.
WATson is the only device worldwide that can quantitatively measure the evaporative cooling ability of a textile or textile system — for example during activity — and is already well received in the performance apparel and home textiles industries.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials—as thin as a single layer of atoms—have intrigued scientists with their flexibility, elasticity, and unique electronic properties since first being discovered in materials such as graphene in 2004. Some of these materials can be especially susceptible to changes in their material properties as they are stretched and pulled. Under applied strain, they have been predicted to undergo phase transitions as disparate as superconducting in one moment to nonconducting the next, or optically opaque in one moment to transparent in the next.
Now, University of Rochester researchers have combined 2D materials with oxide materials in a new way, using a transistor-scale device platform, to fully explore the capabilities of these changeable 2D materials to transform electronics, optics, computing, and a host of other technologies.
This method required new expertise and equipment. At the time, “there probably weren’t any [commercial] labs that could do seven-day-a-week testing and turn results around,” said environmental scientist Sam Dorevitch, who had already been studying this kind of beach testing and leads one such well-suited lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago. If the Park District, which had contracted out the old-school water assessment method to a nearby lab, wanted to adopt the protocol, it needed to hire a new facility. And what do you know—Dorevitch’s lab was there. “I suppose that’s sort of happy luck on our part,” acknowledged Breitenbach.
After trials in 2015 and 2016 to see how the same-day technique compared to the traditional method, the district went all in. The department pays Dorevitch’s lab about $300,000 a year to sample, analyze, and report results from water collected at 20 different lakefront locations every day from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day.
… Duke University’s Center for WaSH-AID worked with the R&D team at MSR to create the Reclaimer, a stand-alone human liquid waste processing unit designed to rapidly treat blackwater – wastewater from toilets – to ISO 30500 standards. Developed in partnership with Cranfield University and Triangle Environmental, the Reclaimer is the result of years of iterative research, development and production by the collaborative teams at these organizations.
… After [Roger] Ulrich’s foundational work, more than 100 studies have investigated the potential mental-health benefits of exposure to natural stimuli. From these studies—many of them small, observational, and imperfect—we believe that nonthreatening natural stimuli (as opposed to, say, a nearby lightning strike) can play a profound role in the regulation of our autonomic, or involuntary, nervous system. Natural settings that, to quote Ulrich, are “favorable to ongoing well-being or survival” appear to signal our brains that it is time to take a breather, allowing us to turn down our fight-or-flight system, restore our resources, and approach things that are good for us, like finding food or socializing. Specifically, we have learned that nature tends to result in reduced circulating levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol and the inflammatory marker immunoglobulin A. It is also associated with lowered blood pressure, improved “affect” (or short-term emotional experience), blunted “perceived stress” after stressful life events, and lower short-term levels of anxiety and depression. We also appear to ruminate less after we’ve spent time in nature, a phenomenon distinct enough to appear as differences in neural activity during brain scans.
But while compelling, that evidence base has left one glaring question unanswered: Does exposure to nature actually, lastingly improve our mental health? Two groundbreaking new studies have, in part, helped to answer that question.
Research led by the University of Exeter, published in Scientific Reports and funded by NIHR, found that people who spend at least 120 minutes in nature a week are significantly more likely to report good health and higher psychological wellbeing than those who don’t visit nature at all during an average week. However, no such benefits were found for people who visited natural settings such as town parks, woodlands, country parks and beaches for less than 120 minutes a week.
… The planetary health diet was developed by researchers to meet the nutritional needs of people around the world, while reducing food production’s environmental impact. It recommends reducing our red meat intake to around 14g a day. That’s around 100g of red meat a week.
Australia’s dietary guidelines are more conservative and recommend limiting red meat intake to a maximum of 455g a week, or 65g a day, to reduce the additional cancer risk that comes from eating large quantities of red meat.
So, what should you eat instead? And how can you ensure you’re getting enough protein, iron, zinc and vitamin B12?
At rest, omission of breakfast lowers daily energy intake, but also lowers energy expenditure, attenuating any effect on energy balance. The effect of breakfast omission on energy balance when exercise is prescribed is unclear. Objectives
The aim of this study was to assess the effect on 24-h energy balance of omitting compared with consuming breakfast prior to exercise. Methods
Twelve healthy physically active young men (age 23 ± 3 y, body mass index 23.6 ± 2.0 kg/m2) completed 3 trials in a randomized order (separated by >1 week): a breakfast of oats and milk (431 kcal; 65 g carbohydrate, 11 g fat, 19 g protein) followed by rest (BR); breakfast before exercise (BE; 60 min cycling at 50 % peak power output); and overnight fasting before exercise (FE). The 24-h energy intake was calculated based on the food consumed for breakfast, followed by an ad libitum lunch, snacks, and dinner. Indirect calorimetry with heart-rate accelerometry was used to measure substrate utilization and 24-h energy expenditure. A [6,6-2H2]glucose infusion was used to investigate tissue-specific carbohydrate utilization. Results
The 24-h energy balance was −400 kcal (normalized 95% CI: −230, −571 kcal) for the FE trial; this was significantly lower than both the BR trial (492 kcal; normalized 95% CI: 332, 652 kcal) and the BE trial (7 kcal; normalized 95% CI: −153, 177 kcal; both P < 0.01 compared with FE). Plasma glucose utilization in FE (mainly representing liver glucose utilization) was positively correlated with energy intake compensation at lunch (r = 0.62, P = 0.03), suggesting liver carbohydrate plays a role in postexercise energy-balance regulation.
Conclusions
Neither exercise energy expenditure nor restricted energy intake via breakfast omission were completely compensated for postexercise. In healthy men, pre-exercise breakfast omission creates a more negative daily energy balance and could therefore be a useful strategy to induce a short-term energy deficit.
The case against processed food just keeps getting stronger. But, amazingly, we still don’t understand exactly why it’s so bad for us.
In two new papers published in the BMJ, the more ultraprocessed — or industrially manufactured — foods a person ate, the more likely they were to get sick and even die. In one study, they were more likely to suffer from cardiovascular problems. The other linked an ultraprocessed diet to a higher risk of death from all causes.
Those studies followed a first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial, out of the National Institutes of Health: Researchers found people following an ultraprocessed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those consuming minimally processed, whole foods.
The intention of creating protected natural areas is to protect them in the long term from destructive human activities. Governments do not always follow these intentions, however, and often legally remove protections and reduce the extent of protected areas. Golden Kroner et al. looked across the United States and Amazonia over the past 200 years and found more than 700 such changes, two-thirds of which have occurred since the year 2000 (see the Perspective by Naughton-Treves and Holland). The majority of these were to permit destructive practices, such as resource extraction. Thus, these changes do not just alter status but lead to irreparable environmental harm.
… As the number of licensed tour bus operators has increased nearly 1,000% since 2012, those challenges associated with them have increased considerably. Looking to alleviate some of the stress, the National Park Service worked this spring with four University of Iowa students in the Tippie College of Business full-time MBA program to develop a new tour bus-management strategy.
Second-year MBA students Jade Manternach of Monticello, Iowa, Cory Shultz of Iowa City, Iowa, Jason Woodruff of Lake Bluff, Illinois, and Kevin Greening of Detroit, Michigan, spent five days at the park and the nearby small town of Moab, Utah, in April. They interviewed staff members as part of the consulting project and reviewed reams of data to get a better grasp on the problem and develop solutions.
… See’s story begins a little outside Golden, Colorado, a former mining town turned Denver suburb. Golden sits where the Rocky Mountains’ towering peaks begin to blend with the plains and prairies that grow ever flatter as they stretch out to the Mississippi River. A pair of craggy mesas overlook the city’s downtown, and a creek tumbling out of the foothills bisects it. It was a place with an abundance of opportunities for an adventurous and curious child to explore the outdoors and ponder how it all works.
“I was always hiking and playing outside when I was a kid,” See says. “I started getting really interested in science as a way to understand what was going on in the world around me. I wanted to know things like, ‘How does this plant use sunlight to grow?’ and what I ended up realizing was that chemistry was a really great way to find out.”
Her interests in chemistry and nature grew in stepwise fashion, punctuated by pivotal moments: first, the day a high school teacher gathered her class to watch as she threw a chunk of sodium metal into a pond to demonstrate an explosion, and second, watching a water-splitting reaction while an intern at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden.
… A multi-institute team of researchers has developed the most comprehensive view yet of lithium-ion battery electrodes, where most damage typically occurs from charging them repeatedly. Manufacturers could use this information to design batteries for your smartphone or car that are both more reliable and longer-lasting, the researchers say.
“The creation of knowledge is sometimes more valuable than solving the problem of battery electrode damage,” said Kejie Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. “Before, people didn’t have the techniques or theory to understand this problem.”
The technique, explained in the journals Advanced Energy Materials and the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, is essentially an X-ray tool driven by artificial intelligence. It can automatically scan thousands of particles in a lithium-ion battery electrode at once – all the way down to the atoms that make up the particles themselves – using machine-learning algorithms.