A glanceable interface presented by a computing device to a user while the user engages in physical exercise can provide information regarding exercise-related data within the context of the user's exercise-oriented goals. In particular, the glanceable interface can display the difference between a user's current exercise level and a target level, optionally with instructions how to reach the target level. Once the target level is reached, the glanceable display can provide raw exercise-related data to the user. In addition, virtual competition can be based on a target-achievement-score that is based on the amount of time, and the accuracy with which, a competitor maintains their exercise level within a target exercise level zone. Competitors can be automatically selected based on the closeness of their target-achievement-scores to the user's target-achievement-score, so long as at least one competitor has a higher target-achievement-score than the user so as to further motivate the user.

Mobile exercise enhancement with virtual competition

A new wearable sensor platform has been developed. It is based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. Because of this the hardware is very flexible and gives the platform unique opportunities for research of a wide range of architectures, applications and signal processing algorithms. The platform has been named NWSP, for Nokia Wrist-Attached Sensor Platform. This document describes the hardware, the firmware and applications of the platform.

Wearable FPGA Based Wireless Sensor Platform

The impracticality of the ambulatory electrocardiogram for long-term physiological monitoring has lead to the development of many new, compact sensors that have been designed with form factor and user comfort in mind. Nevertheless, there currently is no single sensor module that would be ideal to use for continuous, long-term monitoring. The sensors tend to either lack wireless capabilities, have a short battery life, or are financially unfeasible. After conducting a quick survey of recently developed sensors, we propose the design of iCalm: a novel, wrist-worn, low-power, low-cost, and wireless physiological sensor module. Its performance is compared against an FDA-approved platform through numerous experiments, including a few user studies. The iCalm skin conductance sensor greatly reduced noise due to motion and pressure artifacts; the iCalm heart rate sensor performed similar to the FDA-approved sensor. In addition, all of the participants in the experiments preferred the iCalm to the FDA-approved comparison sensors we tested. With iCalm, we hope to enable comfortable, long-term monitoring of the autonomic nervous system physiology and improve upon the current commercial sensors on the market. Thesis Supervisor: Rosalind W. Picard Title: Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

Design and evaluation of iCalm : a novel, wrist-worn, low-power, low-cost, wireless physiological sensor module

In recent years, the use of inertial sensing for body motion recognition has been demonstrated. However, existing work generally focuses on upper-body movements, which involve smaller scale movements and are less rapid. In this paper, we present two distinctive types of demonstration that show how on-body wireless inertial sensing can be used to capture detail inertial information of the more rapidly moving lower-body segments (e.g. the foot). The first demonstration shows how useful coaching support information for a sprinting exercise are captured; the second demonstration shows how inertial information of the lower segments are used to support football computer game applications, through which the users may trigger the appropriate on-screen actions by their foot motion, instead of using the current hand-held inertial sensing controllers.

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On-body wireless inertial sensing foot control applications

Conventional physical activity systems with 3-D accelerometer or global positioning system (GPS) can effectively quantize energy expenditure for aerobic exercise. However, they are limited for aerobic exercise monitoring. To overcome this limitation, we developed EMG based portable physical activity monitoring system. Proposed system extract unique features of motion based exercise and muscular motion based exercise from measured bio-signal. Experimental results showed it can clearly classify the aerobic exercise, isotonic resistance exercise, and hybrid types of exercise. Through this system, more complex types of physical activity can be recognized accurately.

Design of bio-signal based physical activity monitoring system

We have developed a portable jogging monitoring device and studied its application for health management. This device is a micro processor based system with some sensors necessary to monitor the health condition of the user during jogging, that is, a heart rate sensor, a GPS sensor and a physical activity sensor. We also have developed PC based health management software, that receives jogging data from the portable device and stores it as a long term jogging trend data. From these long term data it can feedback the distance completion of jogging on the virtual course. Moreover it can show the trend of jogging time, distance, average heart rate and the user can know his/her own health condition.

S. Wada

Papers

Portable jogging monitor device and its application for health management