McDonald’s has prematurely ended fitness tracker sales in the U.S. and Canada, which came inside the fast-food chain’s Happy Meal.
Intended as a way to get kids active, McDonald’s inadvertently caused a lot of parents to worry what was happening to their child’s skin. It received complaints from customers about skin irritation a few hours after the first day of sales. Within 24 hours, the fitness tracker was removed from all stores.
A McDonald’s representative said the firm is investigating the issue, but we doubt the fitness tracker will return to Happy Meals anytime soon.
McDonald’s isn’t alone in suffering from skin irritation issues, for most of 2014 Fitbit struggled to fix problems with its Force tracker. Intel recently recalled all Basis Peak wearables as well, citing overheating issues.
McDonald’s wanted to capitalize on the Olympics
The wearable was built by the fast-food chain and manufactured in China. It had a pedometer inside to track steps and physical activity, but unlike the pervasive fitness trackers we are used to, the McDonald’s toy had no wireless connectivity.
McDonald’s had lined up the launch of the fitness tracker with the 2016 Rio Olympic games and summer break, two factors that should have more kids playing outside and doing physical activities.
It is a bit ironic that McDonald’s, a fast-food chain known for its high sugar and fat content, giving fitness trackers to kids. However, the company has tried for the past few years to change how its perceived by customers, adding fruit to its menu, improving the quality and sourcing of its food, and taking steps to reduce calories.
The 2016 Olympic Games in Rio bring not only teams of highly trained athletes but also bags full of wearable technology which aims to monitor the health and physicality of athletics as they prepare for peak performance.
In these latest Games, we see sports psychology usurped by neuroscience that is designed to maximize the power of the mind. One company working hard in this space is Halo Neuroscience.
I’ve had the pleasure to interview the CEO previously after their pre-sales sold out within their first week of availability. So I was keen to speak to Olympic athletes and coaches that are using Halo Sport in preparation for the 2016 Olympics.
Meet the Halo Sport
Halo Neuroscience has created a a headset called Halo Sport. It resembles a pair of headphones and uses what it call neuro-priming – another term for transcranial direct current stimulation. This involves the use of electrical pulses to encourage the brain to form new pathways to increase performance. When paired with rigorous athletic training, athletes see improved strength, explosiveness, and skill. The United States Olympic Ski and Snowboard Association saw a 1.7X increase in performance when training with Halo Sport.
The athletes using the device in preparation for the Rio Olympics include Michael Tinsley, a 400m hurdler who won silver at the 2012 Olympics in London; Mike Rodgers, who runs 100m sprints and will compete for gold on the relay team; Mikel Thomas, a hurdler from Trinidad & Tobago who is competing in his third Olympics; Hafsatu Kamara, a female sprinter from Sierra Leone who is competing in her first Olympics and Samantha Achterberg, a modern pentathlete from the United States who won gold at the 2012 U.S. Nationals.
Mike Rodgers
Rodgers discussed his experience using this tech:
“As an Olympian, I spend countless hours working out—both in the gym and on the track. Before Halo, I hadn’t seen a comprehensive solution to prepare the brain these for high-performance athletic activities. With Halo, I’m excited to get closer to my potential and reach an even higher level of athletic excellence.” – Mike Rodgers, USA, 400m sprint
Kamara claims a definite increase in strength:
“I’ve been an athlete long enough to know when I have more strength and power, and I can definitely say that Halo Sport has helped me improve in those areas. During resistance training for example, I usually do weighted hip thrusts at 100 kg — after using Halo, I can now train at 120 kg and I feel like my training is pushing me in top form.” – Hafsatu Kamara, Sierra Leone, 100 & 200m sprint
I was wondering about what their coaches’ perspectives would be. Darryl Woodson, USA Track & Field Coach noted:
“Before I was introduced to Halo Sport, I was always fascinated about how to improve the brain’s role in athletic performance. Every athlete knows the importance of training the mind, whether through visualization, watching film, or maintaining focus, but I was interested in how to improve the communication between the brain and muscles. Now that I’ve used Halo Sport with my athletes, I’m amazed that the brain has such a huge impact on performance. Integrating Halo Neurotechnology into my workouts transforms our training.”
It’s clear that wearables are a key tool in maximizing physical potential in physical endeavors. It’s foreseeable that in the future wearables will be permitted as acceptable sportswear whilst competing. How this is managed and policed with be complicated, particularly in individual sports.
But for these games, Halo Sport is not the only wearable inhabiting this space, whoever partners with a medal winner has the potential to bring their wearable device to the masses.
Music is extremely powerful. We all accept that it can affect our emotions and the way we feel, but science is showing that it has more direct effects on the brain as well, particularly when it is paired with wearables devices.
Brain.fm is a freemium auditory program designed to help people either focus, relax or sleep using AI-generated music. It’s users include students, insomniacs and athletes. Heavily steeped in scientific research, its creators have a history in making niche audio brainwave software for psychologists and researchers and their work includes patents on auditory brainwave stimulation and memory.
I spoke to Brain.fm co-founder Adam Hewett, client and Olympic athlete Robby Smith, and Junaid Kalmadi, who looks after business development for Brain.fm. Smith is using Brain.fm as part of his preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympics.
How does Brain.fm work?
Hewett explained their work is based on a number of audio principles that are combined using AI:
“First, if you’re listening via earbuds or headphones, you’ll notice right off the bat that the sounds seem as if they are moving around your head. The sounds will start out on the side but will move to where they seem as if they are coming from the front, about a book’s length or screen’s length away. This helps focus you on the task in front of you. In the case of relaxation or sleep, the sounds will seems as if they are swirling all about you, and this can simulate the way it feels to sway in a hammock or rock in a cradle, because the brain picks up balancing cues from the ears. It’s the first thing you’ll notice when you use Brain.fm.
Next, we employ two little known auditory principles called Dynamic Attending Theory and ‘entrainment,’ where rhythms appear to have a more direct effect on the brain. You’ll notice that the rhythm is very consistent and that you quickly fall into a mental rhythm yourself – it’s easy to get into the “zone” using Brain.fm, and lose track of time as you focus on your work. But it’s not just the rhythms that you hear that matter: there are also very rapid, very precise rhythms embedded into the sound. You probably won’t even notice them, but if you try you may hear tiny flutters in the sound here and there. These modulations produce a direct effect on the brain that we can examine and confirm using EEG and MRI tests.
The AI is necessary because we wanted the music to be good! And good music is extremely complex to compose. In order to make these principles work for us, we had to find a way to synchronize every single note and beat to the goal of the session, with millisecond precision. It started out as an algorithm, but it rapidly became apparent that we needed something smart – something that could actually compose the music.”
Even athletes need to learn to focus and relax
Robby Smith, the U.S. Olympic wrestling team captain, is a Brain.Fm client. He explained how it’s been helpful in relaxation and sleep inducement:
“I listen to Focus and Relaxation when I’m lifting weights – those sessions help me focus and have the right intensity I need at that moment in time. As an athlete, the closer you get to a tournament the mind begins to work non-stop and it’s hard to shut it down. So in bed trying to fall asleep, my mind thinks about every single scenario and I’m constantly dreaming about wrestling with little restful sleep. Ever since I started using the sleep option in brain.fm, I’ve been completely off melatonin and sleep aids. It’s been my go-to tool to fall asleep since I began few months ago.
For meditation, I combine brain.fm with breath work or simply relax when I have a short 20 to 30 minute window. I prioritize letting my body relax every day, so I usually lay on my back, focus on my breathing and listen to brain.fm’s relax or meditation sessions2
He even has a particular routine in preparation for the Olympics:
“I listen to the focus sessions before practice to help me get ‘in the zone,’ and then after practice, I can come to my room and use the Relaxation sessions to focus on my breath and calm myself down, because I don’t need to be at that high intensity level all the time. I also use the sleep sessions to help myself fall asleep at night, which is very important for recovery from practice each day.”
While Brain.fm’s program is validated by science, I was curious to learn how about how the team was able to make their idea financially viable. We often hear that marketing software in a crowded market place. Kalmadi explained:
“In November 2015, we did a soft launch with Brain.fm on three early adopter communities: AppSumo, Product Hunt and Hacker News. With AppSumo, we sold $300k of Brain.fm product in a week and acquired over 11,300 customers. With Product Hunt, we hit the top 50 most up-voted product of over 20,000 products on the internet. With Hacker News, we were were up-voted #1 for 24 hours. These three launch moments generated enough word-of-mouth buzz enabling us to grow to $45k in monthly revenue.”
According to Kalmadi, the biggest challenge for Brain.fm has been making the tangible benefits of their product apparent in as shorter period of time as possible:
“In the earlier versions of Brain.fm it required weeks or even months of consistent listening in order to notice the differences. After 15 months of tinkering, we’ve now advanced the core technology to the point where users experience the benefits of deeper focus, reduced stress and restful sleep in the first 10-15 minutes of listening.”
Does it work for us mere mortals?
You can try Brain.fm for free a number of times before payment is required. Most writers are terrible procrastinators and I’ve only tried it once but was rudely interrupted by my cat walking across the trackpad of my laptop thus stopping the music. I’ll definitely be giving it another go…when my cat’s asleep.
Brain.fm will be launched in app form in the near future and it’s seems highly applicable with a range of connected devices to aid and monitor sleep and manage focus. The developers are currently working with working with neuroscientists at Wesleyan University to release a landmark study on Brain.fm’s results on the brain which will hopefully lead to future collaborations and opportunities.
It’s been another wild year in swimming at the 2016 Rio Olympics. The last events wrap up today, but it’s been hard to miss the appearance of more technology poolside this year, even if all you noticed were the headphones helping Michael Phelps maintain his death-stare:
But getting into the zone while on deck isn’t that new. Getting closer to a world record is the greater goal of all this new technology. Here’s what you might have seen in swimmer’s bags this year:
The Misfit Shine
In June, wearables company Misfit and well know sports swimming brand Speedo announced the launch of their second Speedo-branded activity, swim, and sleep tracker,Misfit Shine 2 Swimmers Edition. Misfit and Speedo’s proprietary lap counting algorithms track a swimmer’s lap count with industry-leading accuracy and work for all stroke types.
New features with Speedo Shine include:
A vibration motor and multicolor lights, enabling multi-faceted user feedback—see progress and tell time in a halo of rainbow-colored lights, or get motivated with Misfit Move activity
A countdown swim timer—users pick a time to swim and Speedo Shine 2 provides a gentle vibe alert when a workout is complete
Text and call notifications and a silent vibe alarm
Misfit Link compatibility, turning Speedo Shine 2 into a music remote, selfie trigger, presentation clicker, or button to enable a variety of smart home devices and web services
VTT wearable sensors
In cooperation with Finland’s national swimming team and archery association, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed wearable technology for improving sports performance. Wearable sensors can be attached to, say, a swimmer’s hand paddles or an archer’s equipment. From there, data is wirelessly transferred to the coach’s smartphone or tablet.
The sensors embedded in the paddles provide surprisingly precise and varied data on the wearer’s swimming technique. This covers stroke length and changes in it during swimming, the relationship between the outward stroke and recovery, the structure of the stroke and the average pull, the hand position and the pressure exerted by the stroke in different directions. According to Simo Karvinen, the Finnish Junior Olympic Team coach:
“Swimming is an unusual sport because it is not easy for the athlete to check his or her own performance in the water. In addition, very few means are available of measuring development in the swimmer’s technique, in terms such as the efficiency of hand strokes. VTT’s technology provides a means of directly observing the power of each hand stroke and its trajectory through the water, without disrupting performance.”
Using sound data to boost performance
Researchers at Bielefeld University have developed a system that professional swimmers can use to optimize their swimming technique. It enables swimmers to hear, in real time, how the pressure of the water flows created by the swimmer changes with their movements. This gives the swimmer an advantage over their competitors because they can refine the execution of their technique. This “Swimming Sonification” system was developed at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) of Bielefeld University.
Dr. Thomas Hermann of CITEC is working on converting data into sounds that can be used to benefit the listener. This is called sonification, a process in which measured data values are systematically turned into audible sounds and noises. “In this project, we are using the pressure from water flows as the data source,” says Hermann. “We convert into sound how the pressure of water flows changes while swimming – in real time. We play the sounds to the swimmer over headphones so that they can then adjust their movements based on what they hear,” explains Hermann.
This system includes two gloves worn during practice, featuring thin tube ends that serve as pressure sensors and are fixed between the fingers. The tubes are linked to a measuring device that transmits data about water flow pressure to a laptop. Custom-made software then sonifies the data; it turns the information into sound. The sounds are transmitted to the swimmer in real time over headphones. When the swimmer modifies a movement, he hears live how this also changes the sound.
In a practical workshop held in September 2015, professional swimmers tested the system out and confirmed that it indeed helped them to optimize their swimming technique. Of the ten swimmers who participated, three of them qualified for international competitions, and one of the female swimmers is competing this year at the Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The researchers want to continue developing their current prototype. “We are planning to develop a wearable system that can be used independently by the user, without the help of others,” says Thomas Hermann. In addition to this, the new sonification method is planned to be incorporated into long-term training programs in cooperation with swim clubs.
Samsung blind cap
Samsung’s latest innovation is a special swimming cap that vibrates to alert the swimmers precisely when to do their flip turn at the end of the pool. The Blind Cap eliminates the need for a coach or guide to physically tap the swimmer with a pole to indicate the lane coming to an end — the method used since swimming for the blind was established as an official Paralympic sport in 1960.
The Blind Cap is equipped with a vibrating sensor and Bluetooth technology. It synchronizes with the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch and any Android smartphone to work in conjunction with an app. This allows the swimmer’s coach to send a warning signal from their smartphone or smartwatch, which is converted into a vibration within the cap of the blind swimmer, prompting the swimmer to turn without additional help.
What about swimming googles?
Evidence suggests that connected googles are indeed on the way but seem to be taking longer in manufacturing than anticipated. OnCourse Googles is created googles designed for open water swimming (ok, so technically these are more for the World Aquatic Games than the Olympics) to help keep the wearer swimming in a straight line using a pair of subtle LEDs. The goggles analyze the direction the user is swimming and if they veer off course. LEDs notify them of which direction they need to swim in order to remain on course as well as the severity of deviation.
These were predicted to be launched in the summer of 2016 but remain absent. Israel based startup Instabeat has also created smart googles that specifically measure a swimmer’s heartbeat. However they’ve been subject to significant delays of over two years and are pledging to go to retail in Q1 2017.
In a sport where the difference between winning and losing is a hundredth of a second, there are no doubt boxes of technological innovations that are kept under wraps by the Olympic teams.
We’ll probably only become aware of these if medalists and their media machine sponsors, decide to share the word.
Wearables are becoming commonplace in practice games and training, but have received a lukewarm response from athletes, unhappy with the lack of advice or instructions.
Athletes see the advantages of using wearables, according to a report from Lux Research, but want to see wearable providers take more of an active role on the advice side.
That would include analysis on training performance, how to avoid injuries, and how to be healthier. Fitbit, the largest wearable vendor, currently provides limited analytics, outside of a weekly rundown of your efforts alongside heart-rate level and calories burnt during a workout.
“Most wearables today do a great job of reporting factual information but fail to educate consumers on how to modify their behavior to achieve their health and performance goals,” said Noa Ghersin, a Lux Research associate that penned the report.
“The 2016 Rio Olympics have highlighted how wearables can provide technique tracking, not just fitness monitoring. However, other major applications for sports wearables – like team strategy and safety – deserve more attention, too.”
In the MLB, two wearables, the Zephyr Bioharness and Motus elbow sleeve, provide coaches and physicians with detailed performance analytics and data on how hard balls are thrown or hit.
From there, coaches can inquire about lack of practice performance and physicians can check on health issues that need to be addressed before a big game.
Pro sports are embracing wearables warily
Other American sports are embracing wearables, albeit slowly to avoid oversaturation of tech on the field. Unions have also pushed back, worried that coaches will use the analytics as justification for benching or removing a player from the team.
Lux Research spoke to a number of athletes and coaches on three wearables, HTC and Under Armour’s HealthBox, Xmetrics swimming wearable, and Vert’s wearable clip.
For HealthBox, athletes said it needed more “instructive insights” to be a potential replacement for the personal trainer. Xmetrics has to make its metrics easier to understand. Vert should have alerts and recommendations to avoid injuries.
All of these are valid complaints, but part of the reason for low level insights and lack of medical advice is mostly due to regulation. The FDA has come down hard on wearables that attempt to be medical products, something that Apple reportedly found out when it filed its original Watch to the FDA, and had it swiftly denied.
For athletes to receive better insights and advice, U.S. and foreign regulatory bodies need to be more open to wearables outside the traditional healthcare market offering medical advice.
Britain's Andy Murray has won his second Olympic gold medal by beating Argentina's Juan Martin Del Potro after an excruciating four-hour match.
The epic victory made him the first man to win back-to-back singles gold medals at the Olympics.
But the BBC's John Inverdale seemed to forget the existence of women and told Murray during an interview that he was the first person to win two tennis golds at the Olympics.
That didn't go well with Murray, who corrected him:
"Venus and Serena [Williams] have won four each."
Needless to say, people on Twitter had some thoughts about it:
Serena and Venus Williams celebrate victory in the women's doubles on day twelve of the Wimbledon Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, on July 9, 2016.
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