A wearable virtual coach for Marathon beginners

Abstract

Marathon is very popular in recent years. However, finishing the game is no easy task, especially for beginners. Regular practices and training are needed. With the availability of wearable devices, it is possible to develop virtual coaches that monitor the progresses of individual runners closeup and guide them through tailor-made training schedules. Unfortunately, most existing wearable devices only record physiological signals of the runners and rely on off-line processing to provide feedbacks. In this paper, we present the design and development of an on-line virtual coach, which performs real-time tracking and analysis of the physiological status of the runner and suggests appropriate adjustments on the exercise intensity. The proposed virtual coach is a pure software solution and can work with any wearable device that monitors the heart rate and running speed of the runner. The main challenge of our system is to predict when the runner will reach the various running states and instruct the runner to adjust the speed just ahead of time so that her/his body can react in time to maintain the required training intensity. Experiments on real users show that our proposed algorithms can correctly predict the running states of the runners and help them to better maintain the required intensity to maximize the training effects.