Enhancing Exercise Performance through Real-time Physiological Monitoring and Music: A User Study

We present our findings in using musical feedback to enhance exercise performance by means of a prototype named MPTrain. MPTrain is a mobile and personal system that users wear while exercising. It consists of a set of physiological sensors (heart rate and accelerometer) wirelessly connected to a mobile phone carried by the user. MPTrain’s software allows the user to enter a desired workout in terms of desired heart rate stress over time. It then assists the user in achieving the desired exercising goals by: (1) constantly monitoring his/her physiology (heart rate in number of beats per minute) and movement (speed in number of steps per minute); and (2) selecting and playing music (MP3s) with specific features that will guide him/her towards achieving the desired workout goals. In this paper, we focus on the novel aspects of the MPTrain system and describe in detail our findings from a 9-week runner study, where participants ran with MPTrain for up to four 42- minute sessions. The runner study corroborated three hypotheses that we were interested in exploring: The MPTrain system (1) significantly improved the ability of runners to achieve the predefined workout goal, (2) made the experience more enjoyable and (3) increased the runners’ perception of the workout’s efficacy.