Modern athletic training relies heavily on post-run data analysis, leaving athletes without actionable feedback during the effort itself. HUD Speed Glasses addresses this gap by delivering real-time pacing guidance directly to a runner’s field of view, enabling in-the-moment performance adjustments without breaking stride or glancing at a watch. The system targets track athletes performing interval workouts, where precise pacing is critical to training effectiveness.
The system integrates three hardware components: a pair of ActiveLook smart glasses serving as the heads-up display, an Adafruit Feather Sense inertial measurement unit (IMU) mounted to the athlete’s left shoe, and an Android smartphone acting as the processing middleware. The IMU detects footstrikes via accelerometer peak detection and transmits step data wirelessly over Bluetooth Low Energy to the Android application, which computes real-time pace and distance estimates. These are compared against a user-defined target workout — specifying distance, target time, and rest intervals — and the result is rendered on the glasses as a visual “ghost bar,” a segmented indicator showing whether the runner is ahead of or behind their target pace at any given moment.
Development has focused on validating and tuning each layer of the pipeline: optimizing accelerometer threshold and step detection parameters to achieve accurate footstrike counting, implementing a stride length calibration routine, and refining the ghost bar display logic. An Android application handles workout configuration, calibration, and session data logging across multiple CSV formats for post-run analysis. Expected outcomes include a fully validated end-to-end pacing system capable of providing reliable real-time feedback across a range of track workouts, alongside quantitative results demonstrating system accuracy relative to ground truth timing data.