Shahriar Nirjon, an graduate engineering student at the University of Virginia, believes his new Musical Heart app can help you control your heartbeat with the aid of your own music collection. Utilizing earphones that can measure the listener’s heart beat and activity level (perhaps Valencell’s V-LINC), Nirjon’s app can select a song to play that may help get you going with exercise, cool you down, or help you relax.
The app is smart enough to recognize how effective each song is at influencing the listener’s heart rate and improves its selective abilities over time. We hope to see it undergo a trial, as this might be a cheap and effective tool to help people improve their exercise routines and get the most out of music for their chill out needs.
From University of Virginia:
Most portable heart monitors, he said, are not personalized to the user, meaning they don’t provide the biofeedback feature of Musical Heart. They can be inconvenient to use, requiring bulky watch-like monitors, sometimes with a chest strap, and can range in price from $80 to $400.
The Musical Heart system, which is not on the market, may cost about $20, Nirjon said, and is more than simply a monitor because of its music selection feature.
Nirjon will present his system at the 10th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2012), being held this week in Toronto – the most important annual meeting in the field, he said. His paper describing the system has been accepted for publication in the conference’s proceedings.
Press release: U.Va. Computer Science Grad Student Develops ‘Musical Heart’
