Inspiration
One of the hardest things for anyone to do is to step outside their comfort zone. When we brainstormed what kind of problem we could possibly tackle, we went through countless quality-of-life-improvement ideas, from waste sorters to window blind adjusters. But those solutions felt secondary to something that affected people in a much deeper way. We thought of things we truly struggled with day to day, and we recalled our inability to be proactive in healthy choices. Habits like staying up late, struggling to focus, spending too much time on the phone. Finally, we, on a more positive note, we thought about habits we did manage to change, and one of which was our individual hesitations to exercise regularly. We thought that had we had a device like this earlier, we would have had the confidence and the encouragement to stay consistent with our routines.
What it does
FormSync, the name of our device, is placed at three joints: the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder. The user starts a calibration step, where they input the motion of the exercise with zero additional weight to record a repetition with correct form. Then the user begins the exercise phase where the form for each repetition is tracked and correction suggestion in real time.
How we built it
Blood, sweat, and electrical tape. Half-jokes aside, we have pairs of accelerometer and gyroscopes at each joint that communicate to a central Raspberry Pi, which feeds data into our backend platform that compared the exercise repetitions to that of the one with exemplary form.
Challenges we ran into
Logistics was a major issue for us. We were stuck in the planning phase for a while where we could only plan as the Hackathon's database was down and we weren't able to access the online hardware shop at all. When we finally accessed the shop, we saw that our critical components were out of stock. Our only option were to completely ditch the idea or go to the nearest Microcenter, three hours round-trip, to pick up the parts. By the time we were back we had a short while to prototype before the makerspace closed, and we were scrambling frantically for various cables and adaptors to test our components. Technically, managing the heaps of wires throughout the build process presented a major challenge as we daisy-chained multiple female to male DuPont connectors due to lack of a sufficiently long one. This made the physical debugging the mass of cables increasingly difficult with many more possible points of failed connections. Some components came faulty and considerable time was spent trying to debug them, ultimately leading to some last-second changes in the overall architecture.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First and foremost, we are the most proud that we stuck with our project till the very end. This idea came out of something genuine that we wanted to bring to our communities to help people reach their goals and to overcome the fear of the first time. There were a handful of moments in the last 24 hours where we were so very close to calling it quits: in the ideation phase, when we running thin on ideas; when we got our login credentials hours late and saw that our critical component was out of stock; when we spent an hour debugging the esp32 to realize it was completely dead; when we searched far and wide, high and low, for ways to connect the accelerometers to our Raspberry Pi; And now, when we are trudging along, eyelids leaden by our toils across both physical and mental distance, so close to the finish line of this hackathon and the finish line of our bodily limits. All other "accomplishments" are trivial in comparison to this.
What we learned
A project emboldened by pure passion brings a level of fulfillment that one out of obligation can never match. When you build something purely out of your own curiosity and drive, the process itself becomes the reward. As our first hackathon, we enjoyed the mental gymnastics we performed as we tackled challenge after challenge in time and resource constraints. We learned that we can we find joy in our projects despite it not being perfect, and that we were able to accomplish so much in such little time. Other than the technicalities of creating module enclosures, processing data, and wiring components, We learned that our potential lies quite a bit farther than we had believed.
What's next for FormSync
FormSync truly means a lot to us. We want to spend time after the hackathon to fully enclose each module with tightened-up wiring and ergonomic design . We also want to scale down the size of the device as a whole and expand our calibration database to not require one prior to an exercise, and to encompass all possible ones at a gym. Additional features like physical repetition counter, timer to coordinate control under physical tension, and biometric sensors. In the future, we envision our device to contribute to a growing community of people who, once hesitant to began their fitness journey, are now confident showing up everyday.
Built With
- blood
- eletricaltape
- sweat
