Lauren Frye used to run, she said. She trained and competed in marathons, but then her eyesight began to fade in her early 20s.
She could see less and less until she could only make out light and dark objects, she said. She is still able to walk but can no longer run.
“It’s hard to run,” Frye said. “When I am walking I can make out shapes, but when I am running, it’s too fast and I can’t react.”
The kinesiology department has partnered with the computer engineering department to give Frye the ability to run again, kinesiology senior and project consultant Andrea Hernandez said. The project will allow Frye to run by following a lead runner, but unlike before, she will not need to be physically connected, Hernandez said. Untethered running will free Frye from the constraints of being connected and give her the independence she is looking for, she said.
Frye is excited about the opportunity to run again after not being able to for so long, Frye said.
“I’ve been legally blind for almost 20 years and I ran a marathon on my 40th birthday — I was legally blind then — and it was really hard, so I haven’t run in 10 years,” Frye said.
Tethered running is not a practical solution for the type of running Frye wants to do, she said.
“Typically for blind runners they tether you and I couldn’t run a 5K with someone dragging me,” Frye said.
Tethered running forces the runners to stay very close together and this causes a lot of tugging on the rope, Frye said. The tugging is not only uncomfortable, it also wears the runner’s arms out, she said. Being tethered also changes the way the runner moves, Frye said.
“It messed with a lot of things, my stride being one,” Frye said. “It’s more of an independence thing, I felt like I was being tied down.”
However, the project aims to eliminate tethered running and its problems, Hernandez said.
“Untethered running gives more of a sense of independence and is more comfortable than the tugging of tethered running,” Hernandez said.
The project uses an Android phone’s camera and customized software to track a logo on the back of a lead runner’s shirt, Hernandez said. The phone processes the images of the runner’s shirt and tracks the logo’s position. The program then alerts her through a vibrating waistband if she is not following the lead runner correctly, she said.
The vibrating waistband includes vibrators in three different locations, she said. There is a vibrator in front which will vibrate in a certain pattern to tell Frye to speed up and another pattern to tell her to slow down, Hernandez said. The vibrators on her left and right side will tell Frye if she needs to move to the left or to the right, she said.
Running untethered is becoming closer to a reality as the project continues into this year, said Brian Markwart, a computer engineering senior and who is working on the project.
The team is entering the third year working on the project, but second year working with the current design, which focuses on marathon running, Markwart said.
Last year’s design, which used a webcam and a separate microprocessor, was processing the images too slowly, Markwart said. Because the microprocessor was slow, by the time the runner would receive a signal to adjust, that adjustment was no longer needed.
“Last year’s model was processing two frames per second, but we need to be processing 30 frames per second for it to work,” Markwart said.
The team is fixing this issue by translating the software from the old design to the Android phone which will process the images much faster, Markwart said.
“What we are going to do is stick with the original design, however instead of a camera and a microprocessor, we are going to use an Android phone to take pictures and process the information,” Markwart said.
The project is in the design phase and testing will begin next quarter, Markwart said.
“This quarter is a lot of the research and design,” Markwart said. “All the technique work will be next quarter and we expect to have this project finished by the end of next quarter.”
Because of the angle of the phone’s camera and limited processing power, it cannot account for hazards on the ground, Markwart said.
But Frye is not concerned, she said. The lead runner will have to warn her about obstacles.
“The person ahead of me has to be my eyes,” Frye said. “I have to trust them.”
There are no plans to market the finished design, but the team has thought about it, Hernandez said.
“I would like to see this project go gung ho and be available for a lot of people,” Hernandez said. “Hopefully we can spread this information and program to a large scale and project and have it available for all clients.”
Frye said she is excited to be able to use the project so she can start running again.
“I am so thankful that they are designing something that I can run with,” she said.
Morgan Butler contributed to this article.