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