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Description:
The Running Buddy android application was designed to help inexperienced runners and new fitness enthusiasts to run more regularly. In order to achieve this goal we provided feedback on both the runners form as well as the runner's pace. Both of these features helped the target audience to focus on the basics of running and improve on them at their own pace. The point of giving the user the weather at the start of the application is to help the user find a good time to fit in their run. This is important since one of the biggest hurdles to becoming a routine runner is picking a time to run that works for your schedule and will make for a more enjoyable run. There's also a light icon on the application that will tell the runner they should find a better place to run if the lighting is not ideal. This was added since many runners find themselves too into the run to consider simple safety conditions. Lastly in the application their is a speedometer icon that will tell you if you are running at the optimal 160 - 180 steps per minute. The user is presented with graphs at the end to see how they performed over the course of their run.
Technical Overview:
Using the programming language Java and mark-up language XML a friend of mine, Paul Karscher, and I were able to create this android application within a couple of months. Throughout the applications development cycle Paul worked on pulling the weather data from http://openweathermap.org/ and then displaying it to the user based on their zip code. The weather portion also gave the suggestion to runner what they should wear, as well as what time would be good to schedule their run. I was in charge of working with the sensors available in the smart phone to find ways to help runners find out how they performed and to ensure the safety of the runner. The sensors that this application can take advantage of are the accelerometer (hardware), light sensor (hardware), and step counter (software). Using information from the accelerometer we were able to come up with certain bounds the user should stay within for good running posture. Using information from the light sensor we were able to warn the runner when it is too dark in the area to proceed running. Finally the step counter is able to count the steps the user is taking and adjust the icon to let the user know every minute how their pace has been over time.