On the heels of Google buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion, another player in wearables and health technology has picked up a big round of growth funding to continue expanding its business. Whoop, which makes a sensor-equipped (and screen-free) strap that continuously tracks your activities 24/7 and then provides a multitude of performance metrics and other data based on that activity, has closed a round of $55 million, a Series D that it will use to continue expanding its business into a wider range of wearables and analytics that can be gathered around them.
Today the devices measure things like how much strain a workout is causing you, how you are recovering afterwards, your sleep, whether training is having the desired effect, whether you are working at a level that will be less likely to cause injury and how you are likely to perform. Looking ahead, the plan is to bring the sensors into more places than just the strap it currently makes. “You’ll see Whoop over time worn throughout your body,” CEO Will Ahmed said. “The tech can live in other areas of the body, people will not even know you are wearing a sensor. We like the idea of tech being invisible while still being there.”
Stanford researchers just published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine about the Apple project, “Large-Scale Assessment of a Smartwatch to Identify Atrial Fibrillation.”
Researchers concluded that the Watch is pretty good at detecting irregular heart beat, which is a significant advance in medical technology. That’s great for people who have their own Apple Watch as well as the people who can get a watch through their Medicare plan.
The study also highlights the limitations of using the Watch for clinical trials. Researchers relying on the Watch to notice health problems face some of the same limitations traditional researchers. Here are three flaws found in the virtual health study that Apple should fix next time around.
In September, we revealed the specifics of Google’s $40 million deal with smartwatch maker Fossil. While the deal was primarily a talent grab, Google also obtained the license to a hybrid smartwatch technology developed by Fossil.
That technology was referred to internally at Fossil as ‘Diana’ and combines physical watch components with a digital display.
The first embodiment of this technology was the Fossil Hybrid HR smartwatch, but we’ve now obtained a picture that shows off several other prototypes of ‘Diana.’
Since the early 2000s, performance gadgets have become standard fare in cycling and running, thanks to satellite technologies such as GPS. Yet for the sport of swimming, things have progressed far slower.
Most pool swimmers still rely on a trusty wall clock to keep an eye on times in training, which is of little use for pacing an effort… enter Form Swim, a pair of goggles with a smart integrated display that tells you how far you’re swimming, your pace and plenty more thanks to a built-in accelerometer.
CEO Dan Eisenhardt previously worked on the Recon Jet smart cycling sunglasses, but as a former pro swimmer his passion is for the water. Years of development have resulted in what we think is a very polished product. A carry case with five nose pieces comes in the box with a charging cable. To get started you connect to the Form Swim app, which also acts as a social hub where you can make virtual friends and check in on their sessions; you can also sync swims with Strava and TrainingPeaks.
Nature, News and Views, Deji Akinwande & Dmitry Kireev from
The popularity of wearable technology has risen enormously, with the US market projected to be in the tens of billions of dollars by 2022 (see go.nature.com/33tcein). However, the effectiveness of the most common wearable devices is hindered by the physical specifications of their components: although the device is often embedded in a flexible soft shell, the main parts, such as the sensors and electronics, are still rigid1,2. Now, writing in Science Advances, Polat et al.3 report a class of truly flexible, transparent wearable device that is based on graphene covered with a layer of semiconducting nanoparticles known as quantum dots. Impressively, the devices measure various vital signs using only ambient light as a signal.
Inspired by a University of Michigan professor’s recovery after a cycling crash, an innovative patch could bring the assessment of human joints into the 21st century.
The patch uses electronic sensors to understand the functional range of motion as opposed to today’s static measurements. Influenced by kirigami, the Japanese art of creating 3D structures from cut paper, the sensor can hug the curves of a joint and yet can be manufactured flat.
“The shoulder in particular moves in a very complex way. It’s one of the most well-articulated joints in the body,” said Max Shtein, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan, who crashed his bike and collaborated with his students on the work.
Whether for sports, at work or in the living room – depending on activity and environment, our clothing has to meet different demands. Empa scientists have developed a model that predicts how well a given garment will keep us warm. The crucial factor is the air cushion between our body and the outermost layer of clothing.
In winter, it can look sunny and warm. But as soon as we are exposed to the elements, we start freezing. If our clothing is not adapted to the conditions, we quickly feel uncomfortable. Garment developers, on the other hand, want to adapt their products as closely as possible to the requirements of their customers. To see whether T-shirts, jackets or shoes deliver what they promise, tests with prototypes have been necessary for the longest time.
Most maps are optimized for cars, but Strava’s new maps purposefully de-emphasize car-oriented features like highway numbers in favor of trail names, elevation contours and other visual enhancements including improved drawing of GPS tracks using smoothing algorithms.
… Consumers want a curated, guided buying process that will match them with something that fits their needs, style, and tastes — all while providing them with the information they need about cost, performance, and utility. They want to know what a product will actually look like before committing to a purchase.
Real-time 3D turns shopping into a gaming experience as consumers custom-design their own products using photo-real interactive models within immersive environments.
Under Armour’s ICON shoe configurator is another great example of a 3D configurator that puts customers in the designer’s seat — but this one lets buyers fully design their next pair of sneakers.
American Chemical Society, ACS News Service Weekly PressPac from
To seamlessly integrate electronics with the natural world, materials are needed that are both stretchable and degradable –– for example, flexible medical devices that conform to the surfaces of internal organs, but that dissolve and disappear when no longer needed. However, introducing these properties to electronics has been challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed stretchable, degradable semiconductors that could someday find applications in health and environmental monitoring.
… Antennas that receive and transmit radio waves are usually made of metal conductors, such as aluminum, copper and silver. Although these materials have high electrical conductivity, they do not perform well in ultrathin, lightweight antennas. As a result, most metal-based antennas are thicker than 30 micrometers in diameter, which limits their application in miniaturized electronic devices. To make even tinier antennas, Keun-Young Shin, Ho Seok Park and colleagues wanted to try using extremely thin sheets of a 2D material that consisted of a layer of metallic niobium atoms sandwiched between two layers of selenium atoms (NbSe2).
The researchers made their antenna by spray-coating several layers of NbSe2 nanosheets onto a plastic substrate. They then tested the 885 nm-thick antenna, finding that a 10 × 10 mm2 patch of the ultrathin material performed well, with a radiation efficiency of 70.6%. The device propagated radio frequency waves in all directions.
Hardware, and particularly MEMS sensors, will remain an essential part in end devices, but moving forward, software will be equally important in bringing value to the user. Bosch Sensortec believes sensor software will become increasingly intelligent, turning MEMS sensors into more accurate and personalized systems that can help the user adapt to any situation.
“Software adds new capabilities to classical sensor components,” Markus Ulm, CTO of Bosch Sensortec (a fully owned subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH), told EE Times. “I am deeply convinced it is making a big difference to our industry,” fostering MEMS sensors adoption in current and new applications.
After the sporting goods giant Adidas, Primaloft is now also working with Parley for the Oceans. The Insulation provider Primaloft partners with Parley to develop products from marine plastic waste in keeping the wearer warm. The cooperation stands for the growing sense of sustainability in the sports business.
Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have developed silk materials that can wrinkle into highly detailed patterns – including words, textures and images as intricate as a QR code or a fingerprint. The patterns take about one second to form, are stable, but can be erased by flooding the surface of the silk with vapor, allowing the researchers to “reverse” the printing and start again. In an article published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers demonstrate examples of the silk wrinkle patterns, and envision a wide range of potential applications for optical electronic devices.
The smart textile takes advantage of the natural ability of silk fiber proteins – fibroin — to undergo a change of conformation in response to external conditions, including exposure to water vapor, methanol vapor and UV radiation. Water and methanol vapor, for example, can soak into the fibers and interfere with hydrogen bond cross links in the silk fibroin, causing it to partially ‘unravel’ and release tension in the fiber. Taking advantage of this property, the researchers fabricated a silk surface from dissolved fibroin by depositing it onto a thin plastic membrane (PDMS). After a cycle of heating and cooling, the silk surface of the silk/PDMS bilayer folds into nanotextured wrinkles due to the different mechanical properties of the layers.
A breakthrough invention in wearable technology has the potential to change how we interact with the clothes we wear every day.
A new study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Design of Active Materials and Structures Lab (DAMSL) and Wearable Technology Lab (WTL) details the development of a temperature-responsive textile that can be used to create self-fitting garments powered only by body heat. The study, led by graduate students Kevin Eschen and Rachael Granberry and professors Julianna Abel and Brad Holschuh was recently published in Advanced Materials Technologies.
“This is an important step forward in the creation of robotic textiles for on-body applications,” said Holschuh. “It’s particularly exciting because it solves two significant problems simultaneously: how to create usable actuation, or movement, without requiring significant power or heat, and how to conform a textile or garment to regions of the body that are irregularly shaped.”
… Lauren Fleshman is right to call for greater scrutiny of girls’ running.
I’ve written about high school running for decades and covered the 1998 championship event in which Ms. Fleshman competed. Five years earlier, I wrote a front-page story in The New York Times (“Girls Cross Country Taking a Heavy Toll, Study Shows”) that brought national attention to the issues involving the intersection of girls’ training, eating habits and adolescent growth patterns. The study in my article found that among 60,000 athletes surveyed, girls’ cross-country had the highest incidence of injury of any sport.
Medically speaking, “referred pain” means that the pain you’re experiencing on one part of your body isn’t the actual source of the problem. An extreme but straightforward example of the referred pain concept is in the case of heart attacks. You may recall that one sign of a heart attack is a sensation of pain in the jaw. That doesn’t mean there’s a problem with your jaw. It’s a problem with your heart that is “referring” pain to the jawline. With knee pain, there are some considerations to make in deciding whether the pain is caused by a knee problem or an issue in another part of the body that is referring pain to the knee.
University of California-Santa Barbara, The UCSB Current from
… “It’s a very flexible system,” [Sung Soo] Kim said of a network of neurons that fire in synchrony, serving to convert sensory cues into a stable sense of direction we hold in our brains. For example, he said, “When you walk into a really new environment, within a few moments, your sense of direction is already established. Once established, it becomes stable and you’re not confused about the direction you’re facing.
“Even if the lights are turned off,” added Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, “your brain maintains that sense of direction and updates it as you move around.”
This phenomenon represents a balance between the stability of the sense of direction that allows for planning and goal-oriented behavior in animals, and the real-time remapping needed to adapt and have meaningful interactions with the environment.
Former Nike Oregon Project runners’ accounts of emotional abuse by Alberto Salazar are kickstarting a conversation about an ugly side of sports and how to change it.
Hill climbing engages the glutes, quads, hamstrings and calves through concentric contractions. Here are their respective functions and suggested exercises to make them stronger:
With surprising fanfare, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a major new analysis of bicycling safety on November 5 that turned out to be a largely tone-deaf exercise in victim blaming. The NTSB, perhaps best known for investigating plane crashes, repeatedly noted that this was the federal agency’s first report on the topic since 1972.
Forty-seven years is a pretty big chunk of time, but the NTSB’s recommendations suggest that investigators and bureaucrats didn’t spend a ton of that time talking to cyclists or looking at data or thinking deeply about why so many riders are being killed on roads in the United States. At a public meeting in Washington, D.C., where the report was unveiled to the public, NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt framed the urgency of the issues around newly released statistics from the National Highway Travel and Safety Administration indicating that 857 American cyclists were killed in 2018, the worst death toll in three decades.
Increasing your training load will not automatically yield greater performance gains, study finds.
Training intensity distribution (TID)—how much time you spend in different training intensity zones is most important for maximizing training gains, according to the research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
Cyclists in the study responded best to polarized training—spending more time in the harder and easier ends of the training intensity spectrum than the comfortably hard training intensities in between.
… According to Dr Andrew Higginson from the University of Exeter, this is an evolutionary response: “Storing fat is an insurance against the risk of failing to find food, which for pre-industrial humans was most likely in winter.”
A study in Massachusetts tested this theory in 2006 when 593 research participants were followed for a one-year period. Not only did people eat more in the fall compared spring (on average an extra 86 calories per day), but they also did less physical exercise when the temperature fell. As a result, body weight also peaked in winter months, though the researchers added: “Greater seasonal variation was observed in subjects who were male, middle-aged, non-white, and less educated.” Similar results were found in Brazil and the Netherlands.
What happens at the molecular level after exercise? Scientists, physicians and clinical exercise specialists from across the country are embarking on a landmark National Institutes of Health effort to find out.
The Center for Exercise Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is one of 11 clinical sites nationwide participating in the study.
The goal of the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium, known as MoTrPAC, is to create a comprehensive map of the molecular responses to exercise and its relation to health.
Last week we covered a proposal to tax outdoor gear (and legal marijuana and sports gambling) to help fund the tremendous maintenance backlogs facing public lands nationwide. Hunters and anglers have, for decades, paid excise taxes at the point of purchase when they buy pretty much any piece of equipment or gear used in their outdoor activities. These taxes were passed by Congress, the Pittman–Robertson Act for hunting in 1937 and the Dingall-Johnson Act that supports fisheries management in 1950. Those taxes go toward conservation programs, wildlife protection, habitat restoration, and some trail maintenance. The idea is that the hunters and anglers are contributing directly to their passions financially, by supporting programs that keep wildlife populations healthy, while also maintaining access.
What about the rest of the backcountry users? Should there be a “backpack tax”?
… Part of why the Tongass is so special is that it has vast expanses of roads-free wilderness. Rait says roads are a double-edged sword.
“On the one hand,” he said, “they do provide access for the public. They also provide access for commercial activities that in many cases destroy the land. What we saw happening in the decades that led up to the roadless rule were vast clear-cuts across our national forest lands. I think people mostly think of national forest lands as being akin to national parks. But in fact, they’re really not. They’re used for a wide variety of commercial activities, including mining and logging and energy development. And these kinds of activities can have a significant adverse impact on wildlife habitat, recreational opportunities and watersheds that provide clean drinking water for Americans coast to coast.”
The roadless rule he mentioned has protected the Tongass for two decades. [video, 4:31]
How a chipping and route-chopping war put a Wyoming climbing area on the radar of federal land managers, prompting new regulations. A look at how it all went so wrong.