MPTrain: A Mobile, Physiology and Music-Based Personal Trainer on your Mobile Phone

System

We built MPTrain as a wearable personal trainer organized around a target heart-rate curve. An AliveTec chestband sent ECG and accelerometer data over Bluetooth to a smartphone, where our software estimated heart rate and pace. It then selected music from the user's library to encourage a faster, slower, or steady pace as the measured workout diverged from the target.

In the related PAPA work, we generated playlists from the purpose of the exercise and the user's current physiological state rather than using a fixed sequence prepared before the run.

MPTrain hardware: AliveTec chestband with ECG, accelerometer, and Bluetooth; Audiovox smartphone.

MPTrain data flow diagram.

See also the successor system: TripleBeat.

Runner study

In a nine-week study, we compared MPTrain with silent, randomly selected music, and metronome conditions. Twenty-three regular runners completed three or four 42-minute sessions. Adaptive music helped them follow the prescribed workout more closely and improved enjoyment and perceived efficacy relative to the comparison conditions.

Our study involved a small group of regular runners and short, structured sessions. It did not test long-term adherence, people new to exercise, or clinical outcomes; its findings concern performance and experience during the evaluated workouts.

Publications and patent

Conference paper
DOI
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas (2006). MPTrain: A Mobile, Music and Physiology Based Personal Trainer. Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2006), 21-28. https://doi.org/10.1145/1152215.1152221

BibTeX
@inproceedings{oliver2006mptrain,
  author = {Nuria Oliver and Fernando Flores-Mangas},
  title = {{MPTrain}: A Mobile, Music and Physiology Based Personal Trainer},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2006)},
  pages = {21--28},
  year = 2006,
  doi = {10.1145/1152215.1152221},
  award = {Best Paper Award Nominee},
  cites = 234,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}
★ Best Paper Award Nominee

MPTrain: A Mobile, Music and Physiology Based Personal Trainer

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas
Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2006) · 2006
Conference paper
DOI
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Lucas Kreger-Stickles (2006). PAPA: Physiology and Purpose-Aware Automatic Playlist Generation. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2006). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1416794

BibTeX
@inproceedings{oliver2006papa,
  author = {Nuria Oliver and Lucas Kreger-Stickles},
  title = {{PAPA}: Physiology and Purpose-Aware Automatic Playlist Generation},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2006)},
  year = 2006,
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1416794}
}

PAPA: Physiology and Purpose-Aware Automatic Playlist Generation

Nuria Oliver, Lucas Kreger-Stickles
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2006) · 2006
Conference paper
DOI
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Laura Kreger-Stickles (2006). Enhancing exercise performance through real-time physiological monitoring and music: a user study. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (Pervasive Health), 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1109/pcthealth.2006.361660

BibTeX
@inproceedings{oliver2006enhancing,
  author = {Oliver, Nuria and Kreger-Stickles, Laura},
  title = {Enhancing exercise performance through real-time physiological monitoring and music: a user study},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (Pervasive Health)},
  year = 2006,
  pages = {1--10},
  publisher = {IEEE},
  doi = {10.1109/pcthealth.2006.361660},
  cites = 26,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

Enhancing exercise performance through real-time physiological monitoring and music: a user study

Nuria Oliver, Laura Kreger-Stickles
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (Pervasive Health) · 2006
Patent
Cite
Formatted citation

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas (2007). Algorithms for computing heart-rate and movement speed of a user from sensor data.

BibTeX
@patent{oliver2007heartrate,
  author = {Oliver, Nuria and Flores-Mangas, Fernando},
  title = {Algorithms for computing heart-rate and movement speed of a user from sensor data},
  number = {11/407645},
  type = {patentus},
  year = 2007,
  note = {Priority 2005-11-23, Filed 2006-04-20, Published 2007-05-24},
  cites = 232
}

Algorithms for computing heart-rate and movement speed of a user from sensor data

Nuria Oliver, Fernando Flores-Mangas
2007

Presentation

Videos