Ultra-marathon runner Simon Wheatcroft is running blind and alone thanks to an app he co-created with IBM.
Wheatcroft was diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition at 13 years old. Now 31, he describes his vision loss as “nearing completion.”
He usually competes with a running partner or guide but for the 150 mile (241 kilometre) ultra-marathon in Namibia that was held in May, Wheatcroft wanted to run independently.
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With the tech company, Wheatcroft created eAscot, a navigational app that beeps to let him know whether he’s off track and by how much.
“To run in the right direction all you need is a bearing… So we created an app that would notify me if I deviated from the desired bearing,” he told Reuters.
Named after his guide dog Ascot, eAscot’s beeps change pitch to indicate whether he’s deviating to the left or to the right.
“The major challenge was, we’re trying to build something that is a mix between a GPS tracker and something that helps you park in your car,” said IBM engineer Tim Daniel Jacobi. “So we kind of needed to come up with the math to detect how far you are off the track and to think about how often we need to do that and how quickly does the app need to respond. ”
Wheatcroft had to abandon the race in Namibia after about 100 miles (160 kilometres) due to an injury, but was able to race unassisted for the first time.
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He hopes to continue developing the app so that he will be able to use it in a more crowded scenario, such as a city marathon.
“The key improvement is to definitely take it to the city marathon. So the app for the desert used GPS as the navigation system. So now can we create a system which can identify the objects and then translate that information to me. That’s what we’re working on now, some kind of sensor detection system that uses haptic to vibrate different parts of my body.”
He intends to return to Namibia with the eAscot 2.0 and complete the race.
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