So, you just got a new gadget under the tree (or, perhaps for some other holiday – or random sale – in the last while). Congrats! Now, you’ve gotta figure out how to channel your inner sports geekdom to get the most out of that device.
This year I’ve refreshed this annual tradition of a post with all the latest tips – packed full of everything you need to know to get started with your new device.
The WHOOP community is constantly growing, and so are your benefits as a member! Today we’re excited to announce Teams on WHOOP, available to all members on both the iOS and Android apps. Whether you compete for a local club, you’re a gym owner, or you’re just looking for some lighthearted competition with friends or coworkers, you now have the opportunity to create a custom WHOOP team and invite others to join.
… Fitbit indeed faltered in Q3 2019, and was the only vendor in the top five not to grow shipments over the past year. “The basic band market is now increasingly dominated by companies like Xiaomi,” said Stanton, “which has far greater scale than Fitbit and is not solely dependent on sales of wearable devices.”
“Fitbit came from the basic band space, but it is now desperate to move beyond this market, and shift its base of users towards smartwatches.”
The research shows that Fibit’s launch of its Versa 2 smartwatch in September did provide a boost to sales, but didn’t save the company from lagging behind other providers. Fitbit’s share of the wearable band market shrunk to 8% in Q3 2019.
When we won the 2019 Innovation Award last week at the Fitness and Active Brand summit in Los Angeles, we showed something I don’t usually let people see … how asensei sees YOU, 100s of times a second from 360 degrees.
Unbeknownst to the audience, I walked on stage wearing(app)arel – app-connected apparel capturing my posture and form.
Here’s a screen capture of the moment I switched the powerpoint presentation to my iPad, and let everyone see me on on stage the way asensei was watching me in that moment. That’s not what we show you if you’re an athlete practicing with asensei — all of that information is instead translated into the right coaching cue at just the right time. But sometimes it’s fun to see the wizardry behind the curtain.
For the first time, we’ve made human movement and movement coaching legible, teachable and understandable to a machine. It opens up a myriad of possibilities – sports coaching, physical therapy, the “industrial athlete” and tactical and military applications.
Quantifiably monitoring sweat rate and volume is important to assess the stress level of individuals and/or prevent dehydration, but despite intense research, a convenient, continuous, and low-cost method to monitor sweat rate and total sweat volume loss remains an un-met need. We present here an ultra-simple wearable sensor capable of measuring sweat rate and volume accurately. The device continuously monitors sweat rate by wicking the produced sweat into hydrogels that measurably swell in their physical geometry. The device has been designed as a simple to fabricate, low-cost, disposable patch. This patch exhibits stable and predictable operation over the maximum variable chemistry expected for sweat (pH 4-9 and salinity 0-100 mM NaCl). Preliminary in vivo testing of the patch has been achieved during aerobic exercise, and the sweat rates measured via the patch accurately follow actual sweat rates.
The accurate monitoring and control of liquid flow at low flow rates have become increasingly important in contemporary biomedical research and industrial monitoring. Inspired by the drop-counting principle implemented in a clinical gravity drip, we propose a novel microfluidic flowmetry technology for polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based conventional microfluidic devices, known as a microfluidic digital meter-on-chip (DMC), to achieve on-chip and localized microflow measurements with ultrahigh precision and a wide tunable range. The DMC technology primarily relies on capillarity, unlike a gravity drip, to induce a characteristic interfacial droplet pinch-off process, from which digital microflowmetry devices can discretize continuous flow into countable transferred liquid units with consistent quantifiable volumes. Enabled by the passive discretization principle and optical transparency, the DMC device requires no external energy input or bulky control equipment, and a non-contact wireless optical detection scheme using a smartphone can be conveniently used as a readout module. Moreover, the DMC technology achieves an ultrahigh flow-to-frequency sensitivity (6.59 Hz (μL min−1)−1) and resolution (droplet transfer volume down to 2.5 nL, nearly two orders of magnitude smaller than in previously reported work, resulting in ultralow flow rates of 1 μL min−1). In addition, the flow rate measurement range covers up to 80 μL min−1 and down to at least 150 nL min−1 (over 100 times lower than reported similar digital flowmetry on the same time scale) using the current device configuration. Benefiting from its simple device architecture and adaptability, the versatile DMC technology can be seamlessly integrated with various microfluidic and nanofluidic devices for drug delivery and biochemical analysis, serving as a promising technology platform for next-generation highly demanding microflow measurements.
Here’s your quick round-up of news that I didn’t quite get to this past week. Or, that wasn’t quite worthy of an entire separate post. Either way, it’s Friday, let’s get on with it.
Whether you’re traveling for work or for fun, nothing ruins the start of a trip quite like jet lag. Engineers affiliated with the Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a way to deliver personalized advice using smart wearable technology that would help travelers adjust more quickly.
In a series of articles, including one published today in PLOS ONE, the researchers explain how they have developed and demonstrated a series of algorithms that can analyze biometric information recorded by a smart device and then recommend the best combination of sleep and light to help a person readjust their circadian rhythm.
“Using these algorithms and a mathematical model of a person’s circadian rhythm, we have the ability to compute the best light to adjust your circadian rhythm and foster your well-being. This opens the opportunity to create a smart and healthy environment,” said Agung Julius.
Providing secure communications between wireless devices that encounter each other on an ad-hoc basis is a challenge that has not yet been fully addressed. In these cases, close physical proximity among devices that have never shared a secret key is sometimes used as a basis of trust; devices in close proximity are deemed trustworthy while more distant devices are viewed as potential adversaries. Because radio waves are invisible, however, a user may believe a wireless device is communicating with a nearby device when in fact the user’s device is communicating with a distant adversary. Researchers have previously proposed methods for multi-antenna devices to ascertain physical proximity with other devices, but devices with a single antenna, such as those commonly used in the Internet of Things, cannot take advantage of these techniques.
We present theoretical and practical evaluation of a method called SNAP – SiNgle Antenna Proximity – that allows a single-antenna Wi-Fi device to quickly determine proximity with another Wi-Fi device.
Protectors for skis, snowboards and other sports are a core competence of the company Komperdell from Austria. In an interview with ISPO.com, company CEO Thomas Roiser explains why you can’t feel the optimal protector – and what he thinks of the valid European safety standard.
I was a frustrated runner for an entire generation. Not a run shoe generation, as in from the Brooks Glycerin 14 to a 15. The quarter-century kind of generation. Through the 90s and the aughts brands like ASICS and Brooks had the industry by the neck, making high-drop, low-forefoot-cushion shoes, and it didn’t seem like there was any prognosis for change. Then in 2010 two Frenchmen, Nico Mermoud and Jean-Luc Diard, upended everything with a shoe they made for skyrunners, but which turned out to be the template for all runners.
Getting the right climbing shoes can have a bit impact on how well you climb. In this video, Miranda talks in depth about the different types of shoes, as well as the materials used to make them, the types of closures found on them and, of course, how they should fit. Watch the video to figure out which climbing shoes are right for you.
The Walrus magazine (Canada), Sarah Schulman from
… Bad sleep affects marginalized people disproportionately, says Aric Prather, a clinical health psychologist in California. A 2017 study from France found that people experiencing homelessness sleep significantly less than the general population; 41 percent report insomnia. Shelter operators witness first-hand the frustration and aggression caused by exhaustion. But few shelters have the capacity to accommodate flexible sleeping schedules. In public areas, municipalities are prone to installing “hostile” architectural elements, such as tilted benches and street spikes, which are intentionally designed to prevent people from lying down. Social stigma and aggression from passersby can worsen the situation for anyone trying to find an hour of rest in a bus shelter or at a public park.
My career has spanned the history of the mountain bike and I can say without hesitation that this past decade has been one of the sport’s most dynamic periods of change. Innovations and new standards seemed to pop up monthly, and the controversies they spawned were legion at times. Let’s revisit some of them.
Strava
Founded October, 2009, by Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath, the Strava smart phone app was predestined to revolutionize cycling. Think about it; cyclists are predominantly nerdy loners, preoccupied by our levels of fitness and skills, who often train in isolation and are competitive to the point of diagnosable neurosis. Furthermore, we are habitual liars anytime we discuss our performance and mileage with other cyclists.
From Team Sky’s success in the Tour de France to the emergence of Strava and Zwift and Lance Armstrong confessing to doping … there’s been a fair bit happened in cycling over the past decade that you couldn’t have predicted in late 2009. Here’s our selection of 10 of them. Disagree with our choices? Anything to add? Let us know in the comments.
1 – Two of Great Britain’s gold medal winning team pursuit quartet at Beijing 2008 would go on to win the Tour de France
Athletes should pay more attention to their bone health, whether this relates to their longer-term bone health (e.g. risk of osteopenia and osteoporosis) or their shorter-term risk of bony injuries. Perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to modify their training loads, although this advice rarely seems popular with coaches and athletes for obvious reasons. As such, other possibilities to support the athletes’ bone health need to be explored. Given that bone is a nutritionally modified tissue and diet has a significant influence on bone health across the lifespan, diet and nutritional composition seem like obvious candidates for manipulation. The nutritional requirements to support the skeleton during growth and development and during ageing are unlikely to be notably different between athletes and the general population, although there are some considerations of specific relevance, including energy availability, low carbohydrate availability, protein intake, vitamin D intake and dermal calcium and sodium losses. Energy availability is important for optimising bone health in the athlete, although normative energy balance targets are highly unrealistic for many athletes. The level of energy availability beyond which there is no negative effect for the bone needs to be established. On the balance of the available evidence it would seem unlikely that higher animal protein intakes, in the amounts recommended to athletes, are harmful to bone health, particularly with adequate calcium intake. Dermal calcium losses might be an important consideration for endurance athletes, particularly during long training sessions or events. In these situations, some consideration should be given to pre-exercise calcium feeding. The avoidance of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is important for the athlete to protect their bone health. There remains a lack of information relating to the longer-term effects of different dietary and nutritional practices on bone health in athletes, something that needs to be addressed before specific guidance can be provided. [full text]
Stanford University, Stanford Engineering, The Future of Everything podcast from
A biomechanical engineer explains how new diagnostics and improved understanding of human movement are yielding great leaps forward in the treatment of motor dysfunction.
The criticism from an anonymous peer reviewer caught Matthew Heath by surprise.
The University of Western Ontario kinesiology professor had submitted a study on the cognitive benefits of exercise, involving seven men and five women. But the inclusion of women, the reviewer argued, was a mistake, “due to cognitive and physiological differences in the menstrual cycle.” To avoid this complication, women should have been excluded from the study.
Heath disagreed – so he decided to investigate this claim. In a study published last month, Heath, undergraduate research student Kennedy Dirk and kinesiology professor Glen Belfry tested the effects of exercise on cognition in women at different stages of their menstrual cycles.
The results, which appear in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, found no differences linked to hormonal fluctuations. That’s good news for Heath (whose original study was eventually published despite the reviewer’s objections), but it highlights a continuing challenge in exercise research: An overwhelming number of studies either omit women completely or make the mistake of assuming that women are, as physiologist Stacy Sims puts it, simply “small men.”
… it’s something of a miracle that an area this large in the middle of the Northeast, the most densely populated and arguably one of the most-exploited landscapes in the nation, is protected at all. But thanks to an 1894 amendment to the state constitution designating the Adirondacks as “forever wild,” their hiking routes, campgrounds, climbing crags, mountain peaks and paddle trails have been a public playground for more than 125 years. So whether you call the region home, like me, or are just swinging through, there’s no shortage of ways to enjoy one of America’s original public lands.
Two new footwear advances could help soldiers use their own footsteps to charge devices in the field and enable commanders to track their location.
The Army recently awarded a $16.5 million contract to Robotic Research LLC for a sensor unit that fits on a boot and can be used to track individual soldier locations, even in GPS-denied environments, according to a Robotic Research statement.
Imagine being able to spray or paint bridges, houses and skyscrapers with the material, which would then capture light, turn it into energy and feed it into the electrical grid. That’s where this technology is going thanks to UCF.
… There has been a push by chemists and engineers to replace the liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries with solid materials such as ceramics or polymers, the researchers said. However, many of these materials are rigid and brittle resulting in poor electrolyte-to-electrode contact and reduced conductivity.
“Solid ion-conducting polymers are one option for developing nonliquid electrolytes,” said Brian Jing, a materials science and engineering graduate student and study co-author. “But the high-temperature conditions inside a battery can melt most polymers, again resulting in dendrites and failure.”