The iHealth BP5 Wireless Blood Pressure Monitor (electronic sphygmomanometer) measures your maximum (systolic) and a minimum (diastolic) blood pressure in a convenient system using a sleeved monitor shell device and free mobile phone app named iHealth MyVitals.
This year at high schools and colleges there are more cases of head lice than any time in recent memory. While most years head lice are spread between younger kids, it is the increase in older teens with lice that sparked concerned. According to lice-treatment expert Nitless Noggins, there is a correlation between the rise of ‘group selfies’ and head lice.
If you are a recreational tennis player, chances are you wish you could improve your game but lack the time and/or money to join a club and get a coach. But now with MyTennisCam, you can simply mount a camera, switch it on and start playing! This IndieGoGo project promises to provide feedback and analytics to help you play better. Simply place MyTennisCam on the pole of the net and start playing. Three built in high-speed cameras and sensors track your movement and the trajectory of the ball in real-time. All of the game’s data and your stats are automatically…
One key new feature announced with the Samsung Galaxy S5 was the heartrate sensor. Located below the camera on back, the sensor grabs data from your fingertip and analyzes it to give heartrate feedback. The sensor – also in the Gear Fit, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo – is powered by Heartbeat Analytics by Firstbeat, and they’ve provided more details!
Samsung is intent on claiming your pockets and your wrist. The original Galaxy Gear watch, designed as a smart watch companion to the Galaxy phones, received a mixed response. Now only a few months later, Samsung is announcing two new watches, the Galaxy Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo!
Imagine you are someplace where you need water but have none, and the only source is of questionable quality. Solving that problem is the basis of LifeStraw, a portable water filter technology used in third world countries and places with compromised water sources, that you can now buy for personal use in the form of the Lifestraw GO water bottle.
The past two years I have tried GPS watches from Nike to Garmin(s) to Magellan to Polar. Each has positive and negative attributes. Ultimately the design comes back to ‘how much can we stuff into this and keep it wearable’. Magellan Echo answers this by offloading functionality to the smartphone we carry, and acting as a display and controller. Brilliant!
While reviewing the Magellan Echo, I needed a fitness app on my iPhone. There were a few supported, so I tried the popular ones. They didn’t expose much functionality, so I tried Wahoo Fitness, which was detailed in a document from Magellan. Turns out it the perfect partner for the Echo, and it’s the best fitness app I’ve ever used!
Polar built its reputation on heart rate monitoring technology starting in the late 1970s designed to let you REALLY listen to your body. I have friends who swear by their products, and with the RC3 GPS they offer up their latest hardware and software for tracking all of your workouts, and it represents some of the best technology for runners.
Sometimes, no matter how resolute I am in my intentions or intent I am in my resolutions, I just can’t drag my butt out of the house to exercise on a cold morning. I may have found the answer to this dilemma with the XSPIN from Pafers.com and their apps Cycle Rush and Cycle on Earth.
Every morning before I head out for my run I have a routine, wetting my chest and the back of my heart-rate monitor and making sure it registers in the Wahoo fitness app before starting my run. Reliability and comfort are issues with monitors, but now Scosche introduced new heart-rate monitor technology at CES 2014 that addresses those issues!
Magellan recently launched the Echo Bluetooth fitness watch, which pairs to your smartphone and provides interactive display and controls. I am finishing my review, but (spoiler alert) I totally love it and use it every day. At CES they are launching new capabilities for Echo, and also introducing new colors that will make it more appealing as an everyday watch.
Everyone is speculating that the ‘hot new thing’ at CES this year will be ‘wearable technology’. Wearables include the Pebble watch, Google Glass, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, Magellan Echo, and fitness monitors such as Fitbit Force, etc. New to the category is Spree ‘Revolutionary’ Fitness Monitor from Hothead Technologies, bringing heart rate and temperature to help you better understand your health!
With the huge number of sites like RunKeeper and Yelp to give opinions and options for eating and finding routes, you might think it is easier than ever for a traveling runner to hit a new city. Sadly this is not the case, as recommendations of routes often lack context, and definitions of ‘healthy dining’ vary wildly. In this light the new site Ramblen has launched to provide curated recommendations for eating and exercise for travelers. One of my favorite running blogs is the T-Rex Runner – I appreciate the humor and randomness, but also the way she immerses herself…
The Activity Tracker market is getting crowded with new releases from Nike, Jawbone and FitBit offering more and more features and integration into our lifestyle. Is there room for another one? Polar hopes that by offering more features, they can expand the market further. So they have introduced the Loop – more than just an activity tracker.
With the weather cooling off, it gets harder and harder to convince myself to take my bicycle outdoors for an exercise ride, but spinning for miles on an indoor bike can be a mind-numbing bore. Fortunately, the gear heads at PAFERS have released a new exercise aid to help add some motivation to indoor cycling. Their new XSPIN is a Bluetooth enabled device that works with many exercise apparatuses to inspire harder training.
When I bought my second pair of Nike Free Run shoes last year, one factor was that the shoe had the slot for the foot pod that connected to my Nike+ GPS watch that hooked into my laptop to help me track my workouts. Under Armour lacked such a tie-in, so they bought MapMyFitness.
Video games and exercise don’t often go hand-in-hand, although attempts at calorie burning games by major consoles have been made in the past. However, with the new Kinect 2.0 technology included with the Xbox One, Microsoft is trying to lure us couch potatoes off of our favorite La-Z-Boy by combining videos by popular fitness instructors with Kinect’s new ultra-sensitive cameras.
A recent New York Times called ‘The Slowest Generation’ slams the younger generation for abandoning competition and running races ‘for the bling’. The article – and the ‘Dumbing Down, Slowing Down’ article that inspired it – contend that competitiveness is dulled in the aftermath of a generation raised on ‘everyone gets a medal’, and finishing is now its own reward. The articles point to an increase in average finish times for races, the increased popularity of non-timed ‘gimmick’ races such as color and mud runs, and the move to stop funding elite runners at races by Competitor Group. They say that…
A week ago, satire site The Onion posted ‘Nation’s Female Joggers Know They Will One Day Be Assaulted, Buried In Woods’, where women acknowledge this as simply part of the circle of life. All fun aside, as fall arrives it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves of the need for enhanced safety on shorter, cooler days. I wrote about early morning running tips in the first part of spring as I started to see more people emerging from their winter cocoons, and now as school is back in session and the mornings are darker it makes sense…
Today registration for the Boston Marathon opens. Qualifying for Boston is an aspiration or goal for most long distance runners. While some debate if it’s ‘the best’, it is the most coveted and prestigious – and hardest to get into. But there are things more important to me than getting a BQ – I’ll list five. Naturally there are many people – thousands every year, in fact – who are fast enough to qualify for Boston. But as I have engaged the running community it seems nearly every running blog involves someone who has Boston as an eventual goal. I…