It’s lazy to point out that technology makes us lazy. Of course it does. The entire idea of technology is predicated around an efficiency whose end is specifically a decline in human exertion. You know, lazy. But technology’s actually making us fat for another reason altogether.
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New Kickstarter project Trace is like a Fitbit for your extreme sports needs, allowing people who skate, surf, snowboard and ski to track a lot more than just time, distance and pace while participating in the sport they love. The Trace is the latest from ActiveReplay, a company that created AlpineReplay, an app and network for skiers to track and share their stats on the mountain.
Both AlpineReplay and the Trace are the brainchildren of Dr. Anatole Loshkin, one of the founders of GPS company Magellan, and his team of seven engineers based out of Hunting Beach, CA. The waterproof and shockproof Trace is a small cylinder, roughly the size of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which can affix to your board using a separate mount (and it’s detachable so that you can use it on multiple boards in multiple sports).
It’s designed to gather data including speed, distance, jump height and rotation, and has specialized free apps on iOS and Android for surf, skate and snow sports. The apps not only collect your data and give you a history you can check at any time, but add in a social element, allowing you to share that info with other athletes in your field. Through repeated use, ActiveReplay says they’ll be identify more and more tricks, letting them know exactly when a user lands a kickflip, for instance, or a 360, etc.
I spoke to ActiveReplay VP of Products David Loshkin, who himself has a background in applied mathematics from Harvard and has been writing a lot of the code for ActiveReplay, and whose personal interest in and passion for surfing, skating and snowboarding drove a lot of the product direction for ActiveReplay.
“If you’re a biker or a hardcore runner you have all these really cool gadgets to tell you your mile splits, heart rate and so forth,” he said. “I grew up skiing and snowboarding, and surfing and skating, and none of this exists for those sports, even though I think the information is way cooler. You’re doing complicated tricks where the board is spinning in all sorts of directions around you, you’re getting air time, you’re not just going in a straight line. This is a product I’ve always wanted, and there’s no reason at this point why surfing can’t be measured, why I can’t know how many waves I’ve caught for the year, for the month, or for just that session.”
The Trace is definitely cool, but is it something that can scale? Action sports are already more limited in appeal than general fitness activities like biking and run, after all, and only a small portion of people who participate in those sports track their activity with a dedicated device. But Loshkin argues that there’s a very big market for Trace, and notes that huge brands like Red Bull and ABC invest a lot in action sports, and they make up a good chunk of marquee broadcast events like the Winter Olympics.
“There are two sides: There’s the athlete’s side, and we feel that this is definitely going to change everything for surfers and skaters and stuff, but there’s also that spectator side,” he said. “When Tony Hawk says that he did a tre flip for example, my friends don’t know what a tre flip is, but that trick could instantly populate on the screen and you could instantly know that that’s one rotation in the x-axis and one rotation in the y-axis, and we could show that with cool graphics.”
The ActiveReplay Trace campaign is seeking $150,000 to get the device to mass production-ready state, with funding set to close in September and a ship date of January for the first batch of devices. The Trace starts at $99 for an early-bird pledge, and the company is being smart and staging batches so that they only have to manage fairly small volume shipments with each. Dr. Anatole Loshkin has lots of experience shipping hardware at Magellan, and clearly knows that promising too much too quickly is a pitfall to be avoided with hardware startups.
As a former (very) amateur skateboarder, I’m very interested in the kind of data the Trace can gather and report. Action sports may have a smaller user base than more broad activities like running, but it’s not as small as you might think, and it’s also a much more dedicated and invested group, so something like this makes a lot of logical sense for that market.
I’ve changed running styles a bunch of times over the years, shifting from mindless heelstriking to a quasi-shuffle of my own invention to try to lower the impact of running on concrete, to (finally) proper forefooting after getting gait analysis done at a running gear shop. I can’t praise forefooting enough. It is harder work for the ankles, and initially tougher on the calves, too, but once you get the technique down it’s infinitely superior to pounding pavement with your heels. And much faster than a too-conservative shuffle.
Locking a new running technique can be tough though, so enter the Sensoria Smart Sock Fitness Tracker, which wants to track your steps and advise on running style, by doing real-time gait analysis thanks to its sensor-stuffed socks.
Sensoria’s wearable device consists of a pair of socks, containing its “e-textile technology” (which basically boils down to pressure sensors, so it can figure out which bits of your foot are taking the weight as you run), plus a clip-on Bluetooth 4.0 device that also contains an accelerometer and altimeter, and attaches to the ankle of the sock via magnets (it’s detachable so the sock can be washed). This wirelessly connects to your computer or smartphone to upload your running data.
As well as tracking basics like steps and speed, the device is designed specifically for runners so it also tracks a range of more specialist metrics including which part of your foot you’re landing on so you can perfect your foot-strike technique; your overall cadence metronome by measuring stride frequency to help you stay in an optimal running rhythm; and it also has a stride analyser to monitor average stride length to ensure good form, much as a running coach might.
The system can also track inactivity. Because it is a step tracker it knows when your foot has been stationary for a while so it can figure out you’re sitting down and send you an alert to take a screen break. Which sounds like a very handy feature for the average blogger.
Sensoria’s system supports both real-time coaching if you use its app while out running — which can give prompts and warnings for things like heelstriking or retrospective analysis of your performance via its software dashboard. The app will be available for iOS 6 and above and Android 4.3 and above — this limited reach is down to the need for the platform to have Bluetooth 4.0 support.
Sensoria’s creators are currently seeking crowdsourced funding via Indiegogo to get their idea to market and are very close to their target of $87,000, with 16 days left to run on the campaign. Currently all the lowest-priced pledges that include the full device ($99) have been bagged but there are still multiple pledges at the $119 price point. For that you get the fitness tracker and one pair of socks. Three pairs of extra socks are also available for $59.
No man is an island. If anything, every man is a sentient, mobile farm for the countless quadrillions of bacteria that colonize us. And by introducing the right bacteria into that equation, you can give your body one heck of a boost.
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For those of us who are normal, non-scientist people, an image of a virus doesn’t necessarily hold any meaning. Which floating orb is a healthy cell? And which one is the actual virus? The CGSociety recently invited artists to create renderings of the HIV virus in blood—and the winning images are as educational as they are beautiful.
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Among animals you don’t want sucking sucking your blood, ticks are near the top of the list. These hemophilic arachnids don’t just help themselves to your vital fluids, they are also host to nearly a dozen human pathogens including Lyme disease, which afflicted more than 24,000 people in 2011 alone, and the Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever that claimed the life of a six year old North Carolina girl earlier this year. Lucky for us, ticks are pretty stupid. They’ll hop aboard anything that so much as looks and smells like a suitable host—even if it’s coated in pesticide. It’s this overzealous nature that Virginia Military Institute engineers hope to exploit with their ingenious new tick-hunting rover.
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Extreme athletes often hit a point during competition wherein their bodies simply can’t produce the requisite amount of energy to sustain their current output, commonly known as "hitting the wall." While much research has been done towards countering this event (looking at you Gatorade) actively estimating when the wall will hit remains a cumbersome exercise. But this new biosensor has a non-invasive way of knowing exactly when you’ll run out of steam.
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Fitbits. FuelBands. UPs. The market for smart, connected activity trackers continues to get ever-more crowded. And yet, there’s not an obvious winner yet.
Misfit Wearables’ Shine is a new entrant in the space and they may have the most beautifully-designed piece of hardware yet. The company behind the Shine is itself a homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs’ famous “Think Different” campaign and the famous 1997 commercial that began with the line, “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits.“
Backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, the company was co-founded by Sonny Vu, who built up a glucose-monitoring business called Agamatrix that had the first official medical device add-on to the iPhone, and former Apple CEO John Sculley. For a small startup, they have an impressively multi-national team with industrial designers in San Francisco, data scientists in Vietnam and manufacturing in South Korea and Japan.
The Shine is a tiny circle not much larger than a quarter that’s made from Japanese metal or aircraft-grade aluminum. It has LED lights beneath the surface that glow through minuscule holes on the metal itself. Those lights form a ring, indicating how far a person is toward completing their activity goals for the day. You tap the Shine twice to see how much progress you’ve made. If half the lights shine, you’re halfway done. If they complete a circle, then you’ve hit your goal.
I had a chance to test it out for a week or so, tracking everything from regular walks to dancing and downhill mountain biking.
Overall, I love the product. It looks like a piece of jewelry in many ways, and while I’m not an industrial designer myself, several other friends who work in hardware were impressed by the make and form of the Shine.
It is not plastic like a Fitbit. Then because it doesn’t have to be worn as a bracelet like the FuelBand or Jawbone UP, it looks a lot more elegant, especially if you’re a woman and want something more discreet. The Shine is comparable in price to its competitors at $99.95. The Fitbit is about $99.95, the Jawbone UP is $129.99 and the Nike FuelBand is about $150.
The Shine has four different accessories: a wristband, a necklace, a watch and a magnetic clip that makes it easy to attach anywhere, from your shoe to your sleeve to your shirt. My preferred accessory was the magnetic clip, but I didn’t have a chance to try out the necklace or watch.
Throughout the day, the Shine tracks how much you walk or run. It also handles sleep, swimming and cycling, but you have to program it. To do that, you tap the Shine three times, and it will recognize whichever activity you set up in the paired app. Unfortunately, like the other activity trackers, it doesn’t handle yoga (and as someone who practices pretty much every day, the Shine and other competing products are missing out on an hour of physical activity).
The tapping is a bit hard to learn. Sometimes I would tap with two fingers and sometimes with three. Sometimes the Shine would misinterpret a few taps as a signal to record a different type of activity instead of showing me my results so far. You can also use it to tell time with different lights glowing to represent the hour and minute hands of a watch.
“The data science to get the double tap is hard,” Vu told me. “There is no on and off button for the Shine and everything is powered by sensors.”
Indeed, the only way to turn the Shine off is for the battery to run out or for you to remove it.
That underscores the huge benefit of the Shine, which is that it doesn’t need to be charged every few days or weeks. It has a simple coin cell battery that needs to be replaced once every four to six months. It’s also waterproof to a depth of 50 meters. I dunked it in a river in the Sierra Nevadas this weekend and it came out fine, but you could theoretically scuba dive with it, too.
The data transfer to the iPhone is also beautiful. You can see how it works below. The Shine uses a simple Bluetooth connection, and the app directs you to place the Shine on a circle on the iPhone app’s screen. Circles radiate outward before the iPhone picks up the activity data in the Shine.
The paired app tells you how many points you’ve achieved in a day. The Shine doesn’t do “steps” because it would be hard to swim in steps. The middle-range goal of 1,000 points per day requires walking for 1.5 hours, running for 35 minutes or swimming for 25. You can move points higher as you please.
Overall, I was really happy with the product. It is just that much more beautiful looking than the standard Fitbit or FuelBand. For women who are turned off by the look of the bracelet trackers, it’s probably the ideal choice.
The Misfit Shine is only compatible with the iPhone for now, which was surely disappointing for Android-using supporters of the Shine who backed it on Indiegogo.
The company had a successful campaign on the crowdfunding site late last fall where they racked up 8,000 supporters in 64 countries, hit their goal in nine hours and went on to raise $850,000. That was nearly nine times as much as they targeted. Like many other hardware startups, Misfit Wearables used crowdfunding more as a marketing strategy than as a capital source. Misfit had no problem raising from some of the Valley’s better-known VC firms, and this product shows why.
Home 3D printers – particularly FDM, Makerbot-like devices – are still in their infancy and, as such, are untested when it comes to safety. That’s why some researchers at the Built Environment Research Group at the Illinois Institute of Technology decided to test a popular model for ultrafine particle emissions, a measure of how much junk these things emit while in use.
The result? PLA, a starch-based material, emitted 20 billion particles per minute while ABS, a plastic, emitted 200 billion. This is similar in scale to using a gas stove, lighting a cigarette, or burning a scented candle. In short, it’s a significant bit of potential pollution in an unfiltered environment but it’s nothing we don’t do to ourselves on a daily basis already.
The study didn’t take into account what materials were being expelled, which makes it a bit more troubling. For example, according to PhysOrg, ABS is known to be toxic in lab rats but PLA, oddly enough, is used in nanotechnology for the delivery of medicines.
What’s the takeaway? Ventilate your 3D printer.
Obviously these devices are designed for home and office use and probably will never end up under a lab-grade ventilation hood. However, given the various processes used to make 3D objects, it’s important that this research is done to reduce the effects of UFPs on children who may be using these in schools as well as the teachers, designers, and makers who use them on a daily basis.
You can read the entire paper here or just turn on a fan.
via Physorg
3D printing might be bad for your health, according to a new study by the Illinois Institute of Technology. Imagine that. Melting plastic in your home might be hazardous.
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