PhysiBuddy

PhysiBuddy Logo
PhysiBuddy website Homepage
Portion of PhysiBuddy code

Inspiration

The main inspiration for our project came from my team's common interest in exercise and fitness. This fueled our inspiration to create a simple yet effective web application that counts the number of reps for an exercise.

What it does

PhysiBuddy is an application that is used to count reps of push-ups and squats. While active, PhysiBuddy tells you the number of reps for each exercise that you do throughout the duration of your workout; while the camera is active.

How we built it

We built PhysiBuddy by using a library called MediaPipe which can be used to access any input device, in our case a camera. We then used a sublibrary called BlazePose to track body movements using the camera input. After that, we created a website using Figma that demonstrated what our application does and how it works. Our application runs on the web using HTML, CCS, and python3.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging part of this project was to innovate an idea that incorporated concepts that we learned throughout the hackathon in an original manner. We took almost the entire first day of the hackathon to just brainstorm possible ideas, along with setting up applications to work on the project itself. Another challenge that we ran into was creating the code itself, with a big portion of the time put aside to learn how the OpenCV library worked and how to properly use the tracking system provided by BlazePose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is most definitely proud of the website that we created because it's the most polished part of the project itself. The website looks clean and minimalistic, with stunning colour coordination and clean transitions through the website's pages.

What we learned

The main thing we've learned from this hackathon was to make sure that we should prepare before the hackathon, not in the sense that we should start coding but get mentally prepared for the amount of time we have to sit in front of the computer and learn about different coding concepts. This was our first ever hackathon so we almost knew next to nothing about creating an application, even though we are all mostly fluent in python3 and web development. Another thing that we learned is how to use the OpenCV library in python3, this library is extremely useful to create more immersive applications to record/manipulate the different forms of inputs that are available to us as developers.

What's next for PhysiBuddy

We believe that PhysiBuddy has great potential if given more time, and could become an extremely polished and regularly useable web application that would help the population exercise properly in the safety and comfort of their own home. This application could be further taken to higher levels by adding more types of exercises, a system to detect proper form during an exercise, and even creating a phone application so that people on IOS or Android devices can use the great functionalities that PhysiBuddy comes with.