MyoVision

Inspiration

The human mind has never been put under greater pressure before. With the advent of internet bringing onto a new era connectivity allowing us to access the world at our fingertips, it has also made us less physical. Studies after studies have gone on to provide evidence on the detrimental effects of lack of exercise on physical and mental health. Asking all medical specialists - physical fitness remains one of the best ways to prevent and improve the human mental condition. That's why we created MyoVision, to provide a tool for everyone that might need that helping hand, but might be unable to afford an expensive personal fitness trainer.

What it does

This program, used alongside the Myo Armband is testament to the progress of human ingenuity. In the past, there have been applications where you can keep track of your physical fitness via checking in and tracking the app, but it was always based on the person's true intent and honesty. Introduce Myo. Myo armband keeps track of what exercise you're currently doing and how many times (reps) you're doing it, to ensure maximum effectiveness, all autonomously without the user having to physically type anything in. And if you fall short of your goal? You're going to see $0.50 donated to the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) every time! It goes to a good cause and promotes the risk-regard behaviour, including the individual to work harder to stay more physically fit.

How we built it

We built this program using C/C++, having used the raw gestural and spatial data coming from the Myo armband, to categorize, synthesize, and progressively analyse with various regression techniques to determine the optimal values that best highlight the individual doing a push-up or a sit-up. Exercises like bench-presses have not yet been placed into this software due to the physical restrictions of being unable to access such weights during the hackathon. When we were still considering Alexa, we used all tech associated with Alexa including: Node JS, AWS Lambda, Python, Bash and JS.

Challenges we ran into

Like many projects, we ran into enumerable challenges during this process that really taught us the difference between aestheticism and functionality. Originally planning on having a range of activities, it proved challenging enough to involve one main activity in this program due to the nature of the API and development SDKs available for the Myo. During the first half of the hackathon, we invested a great deal of our time and resources on setting up Amazon Alexa and integrating it with Myo in order to provide a fully immersive experience. We were even able to build a few skills on the Alexa dev platform. However, we soon learnt that integrating the Myo and Alexa was extremely difficult and would take an enormous amount of time, eating away from actually making any tangible progress towards our hack. So, Saturday evening, we decided to fully abandon Alexa and just focus on building an MVP of our product. P

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of having created a routine - one where you can slip on a Myo Armband, work out, and watch as the data of your workout is seamlessly and automatically stored on your computer.

What we learned

We learnt about the intricacies of combining two hardware technologies - notable the Myo and Amazon Echo (Alexa), and the usability of C++ as a multi-disciplinary language.