Irun: A smartphone-based system to alert runners to warm up before running

Abstract

Running is a good way to keep healthy and relax, while many runners suffer from injuries because of a lack of running knowledge and ignoring the importance of warm-up. Inspired by the fact that more and more people run with smartphones tied up to their arms, we propose a novel system named iRun to alert people to warm up before running. iRun is based on the sensors built in most off-the-shelf smartphones like accelerometers, and it uses human activity recognition (HAR) methods to detect whether the runners warm up or not. The most challenging work is to choose the features that can represent the characteristic of various warm-up actions because different people have different exercise habits. By carefully designing the feature vector which contains features from multi-domains and doing a series of experiments to decide the slide window size and classifier, iRun can achieve 91.4% true positive (TP) rate in average to distinguish every warm-up action from other movements like running, walk, going upstairs, etc.