Revealing the Mutual Information between Body-Worn Sensors and Metabolic Cost in Running

Abstract

Running power is a popular measure to gauge objective intensity. It has recently been shown, though, that foot-worn sensors alone cannot reflect variations in the exerted energy that stems from changes in the running economy. In order to support long-term improvement in running, these changes need to be taken into account. We propose leveraging the presence of two additional sensors worn by the most ambitious recreational runners for improved measurement: a watch and a heart rate chest strap. Using these accelerometers, which are already present and distributed over the athlete’s body, carries more information about metabolic demand than a single foot-worn sensor. In this work, we demonstrate the mutual information between acceleration data and the metabolic demand of running by leveraging the information bottleneck of a constrained convolutional neural network. We perform lab measurements on 29 ambitious recreational runners (age = 28 ± 7 years, weekly running distance = 50 ± 25 km, V˙O2max = 60.3 ± 7.4 mL · min−1· kg−1). We show that information about the metabolic demand of running is contained in kinetic data. Additionally, we prove that the combination of three sensors (foot, torso, and lower arm) carries significantly more information than a single foot-worn sensor. We advocate for the development of running power systems that incorporate the sensors in watches and chest straps to improve the validity of running power and, thereby, long-term training planning.

Bottleneck identification and transfer prediction for automated production lines based on FNN

“…Baumgartner et al approached bottleneck identification from the standpoint of machine continuous processing, using the longest average active time of equipment as an indicator for bottleneck identification. Furthermore, a mobile bottleneck identification method was proposed based on this study [10] . Alesiani et al proposed a dynamic bottleneck identification method focusing on work-in-progress, using the number of work-in-progress as the object of study [11] .…”