How Do Runners Experience Personalization of Their Training Scheme: The Inspirun E-Coach?

Among runners, there is a high drop-out rate due to injuries and loss of motivation. These runners often lack personalized guidance and support. While there is much potential for sports apps to act as (e-)coaches to help these runners to avoid injuries, set goals, and maintain good intentions, most available running apps primarily focus on persuasive design features like monitoring, they offer few or no features that support personalized guidance (e.g., personalized training schemes). Therefore, we give a detailed description of the working mechanism of Inspirun e-Coach app and on how this app uses a personalized coaching approach with automatic adaptation of training schemes based on biofeedback and GPS-data. We also share insights into how end-users experience this working mechanism. The primary conclusion of this study is that the working mechanism (if provided with accurate data) automatically adapts training sessions to the runners' physical workload and stimulates runners' goal perception, motivation, and experienced personalization. With this mechanism, we attempted to make optimal use of the potential of wearable technology to support the large group of novice or less experienced runners and that by providing insight in our working mechanisms, it can be applied in other technologies, wearables, and types of sports.