App monitors your heart rate and gives you the best music for your run

Ask a group of runners about listening to music when they workout and you’ll get a mixture of responses, there are many who think a good tune can push you to incredible levels, some think it completely distracts you from your breathing and what your body is up to and others just see how they feel day to day.

Well now a new system that’s currently being developed by researchers at the University of Virginia aims to listen to your heart rate and serve up tunes that will slowly push your pulse into the right range to workout without you having to think about it.

The running system works by embedding a small microphone into a set of headphones, which can then listen for the sounds of arteries in your ear and records how they’re behaving. The data from the microphone is then paired up with stats from an accelerometer, which is sent to a recommendation engine on the web, which is able to choose the song based on what the runner wants to achieve and how much they want their heart to get pumping.

It’s not just about working your heart up into a fast-paced dance tune frenzy though, the system can also be specially programmed to play music that calms you down and causes your heart rate

The researchers also have big plans for the system and its accompanying recommendation engine and will based future suggestions on how well past tunes helped heart rate to increase or decrease, because at the end of the day a tune could have a great beat but something about the artist or genre could make you feel a certain way and prove to be ineffective.

[Via New Scientist Image via lululemon athletica’s flickr]