Healthy Hacker

Official Product Photos
Display in Action

Inspiration

Plenty of our team members love to workout and go to the gym. We always were curious if there was a device that could optimize our time in the gym.

What it does

Our product reads your active heart rate and fills up an animated bar as the users heart rate increases. Our display has 3 separate zones. When the heart rate is below the optimal fat burning heart rate zone, which is calculated based off of age, the screen will tell the user to speed up and the bar will not be very filled. When in the optimal zone, the device encourages the user with a positive message on screen, LED turns on, and points begin to be earned. The longer in the zone, the more points that are earned. When the heart rate of the user gets too high the watch vibrates, the LED flashes, the watch vibrates rapidly, and the user stops earning points. Your goal is to stay in the zone to keep earning points to optimize your workout. Compete with yourself or others to see who stayed in the zone the longest, making the most out of their workout.

How we built it

Of course, our initial design was implemented on a breadboard, then moved to a 3d printed housing designed by our team. The internal components included heart rate sensor, a white-light OLED display connected to an Arduino nano, a green LED, a vibration motor, all powered by four 3v coin batteries.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was making best use of space. We wanted our product to be a watch that goes almost unnoticed when the user is exercising, so it had to be small. Another problem was that when we had a keypad attached that controlled different screens and turned the device on and off using buttons, the Arduino and the OLED display could not handle it. The device would crash and the OLED's refresh rate would drop very much and commands would take way too long to process.

What's next for Healthy Hacker

As more of our wearables are produced, the plan to is to have them communicate to an app similar to social media. You can add friends and family that also have the devices and compete to see who has the most points and is making the most of their exercise time.