Professional athletes and casual joggers pushing through their first half-marathon are well aware of the difference a cheering crowd can make in finding that extra gear.
Now, one Maltese researcher is working on a project using smartphones to provide that friendly push from anywhere in the world. The HeartLink project, a joint effort between the University of Malta and Lancaster University, in the UK, is developing an app that allows athletes to broadcast their data – pace and heart rate, for example – to friends and family in real-time during a race.
Their followers, meanwhile, can use the app to send a virtual ‘cheer’, which the athletes receive as sounds or vibrations, letting them know they are following and supporting their efforts.
There’s a positive feeling for both the athlete and their followers
Franco Curmi, a marketing lecturer at the University of Malta and one of the
developers, told the Times of Malta research had already shown athletes perform better when they were cheered on during sporting events.
The HeartLink team built on the research by trying their app during a number of
events ranging from a charity run to a 170-mile relay race across the UK.
What they found was not only that virtual cheers had a similar effect to a live crowd but that it was possible to work out what sort of cheers had the biggest impact: support from acquaintances, for example, tended to be more powerful than loved ones; charity events drew bigger engagement than competitive races.
“There’s a positive feeling for both the athlete and their followers,” Dr Curmi said. “For the people at home, it feels like they’re contributing – they’re no longer just an observer,” he added. The app is still going through testing and could be commercially available next summer but the team is still looking at ways to take the project further.
One area they are exploring is how the technology could be linked to fundraising, not only allowing supporters to make donations ahead of a race but letting the athlete ‘unlock’ donations at specific points in the race: a distance marker, a particular altitude or even a heartbeat spike indicating a rough patch.
They are also mining the data to figure out when cheering is most effective: whether at the start of the race, the end or at moments of greatest effort. But the idea can go further still: in a piece for the University’s Think magazine, Dr
Curmi raises the idea of a running vest that automatically tracks biometric data and transmits it live to well-wishers.
Such a device could even make use of a neural network to understand the athlete’s feelings at a given moment. Combined with the physiological data, this could be used to develop an ‘empathetic algorithm’ – nudging supporters to cheer the athlete right when they are feeling ready to quit.