Application and UI Design for Ergonomic Heart Rate Monitoring in Endurance Sports: Realizing an Improved Tool for Health and Sports Activities on Base of Android Smartphone Programming and ANT+

Abstract

During endurance sports training, heart rate conveniently can be used as proportional measure for the current physical effort of an on-going workout. Accordingly, it is advantageous during such exercises to obtain monitoring information about the actual heart rate for having an instrument of controlling the demand level of an activity. Today, the market offers a broad variety of sports computers, which allow display and tracking of heart rate, but their usability and appropriateness appear rather limited in terms of an efficient application in daily training. In particular, major restrictions are numerical displays of the in-time measures with tiny letters or an unfiltered print-out of spurious values, since the recording is not always precise, but sometimes disturbed from various reasons. Fortunately, upcoming new technologies like programmable smartphone devices and ANT+ communication standard for sports sensors do allow developing new and optimized applications and systems also for sports and health purposes. In the work here, a convenient heart rate monitor was developed that aims at improved user-friendliness in combination with elaborated signal-conditioning for preventing any spurious and misguiding displays. Few simple button presses put the sportsman into the position of performing efficiently activities within the desired endurance training range. As result, a system is described that is feasible for easy-to-use and efficient sports monitoring, especially during daily workouts.