Are you ready, boots?
UnitedHealthcare and Qualcomm Inc. have integrated wearable devices from Samsung Electronics America Inc. (Fit2 Pro and Gear Sport) and Garmin International Inc. (vivosmart® 3) into UnitedHealthcare Motion™, a national wellness program that provides eligible plan participants access to activity trackers and enables them to earn more than $1,000 per year by meeting certain daily walking goals. UnitedHealth says that Motion participants have collectively walked 130 billion steps, earning more than $19 million in incentives since the program began. The program enables employees to earn up to $4 per day in financial incentives based on achieving F.I.T. goals: 1) Frequency: complete 500 steps within seven minutes six times per day, at least an hour apart; 2) Intensity: complete 3,000 steps within 30 minutes; and 3) Tenacity: complete 10,000 total steps each day.
For those long, long rides
Naztech (www.naztech.com) introduced the Xtra Drive Mini, a thumb-sized, high-speed Micro SD card reader capable of up to 256GB of extra storage for iOS devices including the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X, as well as the iPad and iPod. It has a capacity of up to 170,000 photos, 74,000 songs, or 72 hours of video. Shows can be watched directly from the drive without using any of the Apple device’s own memory.
Your personal physician
The Apple watch doesn’t have a sphygmomanometer or polysomnographic equipment found in a sleep lab — but thanks to machine learning, it might be able to help with their work, reports Wired. Research presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Anaheim claims that, when paired with the right machine-learning algorithms, the Apple Watch’s heart-rate sensor and step counter can make a fair prediction of whether a person has high blood pressure or sleep apnea. The new study adds to evidence that the right algorithms might transform the Apple Watch from personal trainer to personal physician.
Weekend deals
Apple is offering a feature to the App Store called “This Weekend Only,” which lists deals that can be found inside apps, as opposed to discounts on downloads of apps themselves, according to TechCrunch. Every Thursday, users will find on the Apps tab an app labeled “This Weekend Only,” with promotions valid through Sunday.
Startups to watch
Some startups that could make your life easier and your business run smoother, per the Chicago Tribune: 1) Foodietrip (matches people looking for food tours with hosts for tastings); 2) Gadget Flow (shopping site for cutting edge products, including those from Kickstarter, Etsy, Amazon and IndieGoGo); 3) COSIGN (lets you click on objects, such as clothing, on a friend’s social media page and tells you where you can buy it); 4) globalVcard (could become the premier provider in digital payment); 5) Pindrop (neutralizes phone calls that are trying to steal someone’s identity); 6) Nowait (partners with Yelp to let you virtually stand in line at a restaurant); and 7) Bellhops (active in 50 cities, hooks you up with college kids who are willing to move your stuff).
Do it yourself
BITalino is a set of hardware and software ingredients that allow just about anyone to build their own body monitoring devices, reports Madgadget. The folks behind BITalino have made it easier to collect data from different body sensors, to process it, and to share it. The software, which previously required stand-alone computers to run, is now available in a cloud-based version. It makes it easy to go from assembling a kit to using the gathered data, as there’s no software to install or a computer to manage. Moreover, BITalino is beginning to provide plugins for the software that are designed to process specific kinds of data in a proper way. One of the first releases is a heart rate variability package that implements guidelines from the Task Force of the European Society of Cardiology and the North American Society of Pacing Electrophysiology. All the gathered and processed data can be stored on Dropbox, Google Drive and other online cloud storage systems. There’s also an Android app that can be used to gather data, and work is underway to allow memory cards to be used to acquire the data.