MovePacer Audio Feedback

About MovePacer Audio Feedback Android App

An app to provide real-time audio feedback on endurance exercise cadence, heart rate, and speed. Can also log the signals onto the smartphone memory. Uses your Movesense sensor for heart rate, and cadence.

Of note, has high power consumption. Android will turn the app off automatically unless you whitelist the app manually for ignoring power optimisations (something akin to Settings -> Battery -> Energy Saver -> MovePacer and turn the selections for power consumption optimisations off).

USE

• Switch on GPS (required to scan for bluetooth sensors) and Bluetooth


• Start the app, grant access to location, and power savings exemption (remains active when off focus, android kills background activities with high power consumption)


• Click scan, and click on the sensor you'd like to log


• Wait about 10 s for the connection to initalise, should start seeing visualisation at which point you can switch out of the app while still receiving the audio feedback. Ready to do your exercise!


• When done exercising, start the app again and click shutdown. This will close the background activity and shutdown.


• If logging is enabled, data will be stored in Android/data/timo.jyu.movepacer/files/movesenseLog and ../dataLogger/ folders on your smartphone internal drive. Note, these folders will be permanently removed when you uninstall the app so make a backup prior to uninstallation if you want to keep onto the files! The files are tab delimited text files with an UTC timestamp (milliseconds since midnight 1/1/1970 in Greenwich), and may have multiple samples for for each timestamp with a corresponding index to indicate sample order with a given timestamp. You will need to sort the samples after reading the file!

FEATURES

• Audio feedback on Heart rate , speed, and step rate


• Select feedback language and voice (uses Google Text to Speech, which has many languages on offer)


• Adjustable feedback interval (10 s to 600 s)


• Toggle audio feedback on/off


• Toggle heart rate, speed or cadence feedback on/off


• Log raw data (can toggle on/off)


• Toggle units for speed between m/s or km/h and cadence Hz or cycles/min

OF NOTE:

• GPS cannot be activated programmatically so you will have to enable GPS manually, otherwise it cannot be logged. You will first need to enable location, and then go into Mode and select 'Device only' or 'High accuracy' to enable the GPS.


• Cadence estimation is challenging, and will fail occasionally, and will work better for running compared to other activities


• Cadence (steps per second) based on least-squares-spectrum analysis (essentially by implementating the method I reported in Rantalainen et al J Appl Biomech. 2016 Aug;32(4):401-6. doi: 10.1123/jab.2015-0266.).


• Movesense sample rates are hard-coded, and 104 Hz is used for the accelerometer (or inertial and magnetometer recordings), and 256 Hz is used for the 1-lead ECG.
  

The app is based on Movesense data log sample, and includes their mdslib version 1.44 aar library.

Bluetooth is managed with RxAndroidBle2 library version 1.10.2, and rxjava version 2.2.8

Data serialization for transfer as broadcasts from the service to the app is handled with Google GSON library version 2.8.0