2-January-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper

The Connected Gym: Tier 1- Automated Check-in & Check-out

Advanced Technology in your Fitness Club

Technology moves fast, the real world sometimes not so fast in the brick and mortar buildings that we spend our lives in. You can apply the Immersive Space (see Immersive Spaces) concept anywhere. In this article, we’ll show how to implement advanced technology in your Fitness Club.

Many fitness clubs are still figuring out their digital strategy, so we will build this out in steps. We will discuss how to create the entry point- a digital doorway, into an immersive space. Using this digital doorway, you can gather useful and new data, and improve the Member Experience at the same time.

The Digital Doorway

The key to a digital doorway is using Beacons. They are simple Bluetooth transmitters that transmit a unique ID along with some business-identifying information. An application on the member’s phone (typically your club app) will handle the necessary actions initially as this process plays out. When a person passes through a beacon field, the phone will pick up the signal.

Check-in is associated with the front door and the reception desk, so you will need a wide-area beacon to cover that area. One of the other main properties of beacons is controlling the size of the area covered. They can cover a small area such as a doorway, as well as a much bigger area to the limits of Bluetooth coverage itself.

To indicate someone is entering the club, vs. simply walking by the front desk, you need a another beacon by the front door, which triggers first. And ideally, you should have two beacons by the front door, which will tell you if someone is walking in or out. This is important data, which we’ll get to soon.

If you look at the image above, you’ll see the animated sequence of beacons that are actively read as the member walks into a club and into the reception area.

This also works in reverse, as a person exits the club (or any other immersive space). At this point, you have two pieces of data available- when a member enters the club (along with their identity), and when the member leaves the club.

New Data

Currently, clubs have semi-automated check-ins, usually scanning a badge, QR code, or fingerprint. This gives you two pieces of data- the member’s identity, and check-in time. It’s useful for attendance tracking and dropout prediction, since presumably a member will visit less and less before they drop their membership.

In addition to this, you know about any additional purchases they make, such as boot camp purchases and personal training. Certainly it’s likely that members who purchase these services are more likely to keep their membership active. However, only a small percentage of members actually by these (more expensive) additional services.

If you could capture one more piece of data that was easy to gather, what would be the next, most useful thing to capture? I would suggest that Duration of Stay is the next, easily available piece of data that can offer enormous value.

If you see that a member is staying for 15-20 minutes and leaving, then they likely are not as engaged with the club as they could be. From my own personal experience, I failed at several attempts to get into a fitness routine because I was overweight and shy. I felt intimidated at the club around people that I felt were far more experienced than me This is very common among newbies to a club, and short visits can be a sign of this, which very likely will result in an eventual lapse of their membership.

By having both check-in and check-out times, you have Duration of Stay. You can use this indicator, which will show up before attendance drop-off kicks in, to step in and help these newbies learn how to use the club and to let them know they are not alone in feeling this way. You can put unused trainer time to use to give the user a simple orientation to the club so they feel more at home and feel in control of their fitness journey. This will help them set manageable goals and expectations so they aren’t disappointed by early, apparent lack of progress.

Member Experience

When you have your new members engaging in the club more productively from the start, you will have happier members and you will have improved the Member Experience.

Two other things to note: With what is now an automated check-in process, you have also made that small task even easier, and you will have improved that bit of the Member Experience.

A second improvement, if you have a wearable app, is that the check-in process can auto-launch the tracking the workout’s intensity on the member’s smart watch. When they leave the club, which checks them out, the tracking can be stopped and the watch will automatically store the results in the health application on their phone and the club can get a record of their effort- another valuable data point.

You can’t manage what you don’t know. By taking this baby step and bringing this advanced technology in your Fitness Club, you will begin to open the door to a wonderful new world of Analytics.

For a good read on the pressures for fitness clubs to embrace more technology, click here to read Bryan O’Rourke’s and Sean Maguire’s take on it.

If you are not technically-minded, you may skip the addendum below. It is intended for those who wish to go a little deeper into how this all works.

Technical Details- Addendum

For those who wish to go a bit deeper, keep reading.

Beacons play a central role in enabling this capability. On the right is one example of a basic beacon. They are small devices, can be battery powered or wired in. They are programmed with a unique ID (UUID) and facility codes that is continuously broadcast over Bluetooth. Since it is a simple radio, the field is spherical from the emitter, tapering off in strength as you move away from it.

You can also implement virtual beacons using WiFi technology, which has the advantage of being able to define the region to any shape you wish. However, they are more complicated and for now, less practical. We’ll stick with Bluetooth beacons for the time being.

No two beacons will have the same ID. You can see an example of the format below. They emit a string that is a combination of the Unique ID as well as identifying information on where the beacon is located. This allows an app to subscribe to notifications of only beacons in your physical locations, and not respond to beacons that might be located in a shopping mall, for example.

UUID Example: 
ffffffff-1234-aaaa-1a2b-a1b2c3d4e5f6 
12345678-abcd-88cc-abcd-1111aaaa2222 
ffffffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffffffffffff

To enable automatic beacon detection, you will need to enable your Club App to subscribe to beacons from your locations that contain your company ID, so they can respond when the user walks into your club. When the member enters the club, the phone picks up the first beacon and checks to see if there are any apps installed that want to know about this beacon. It will find your app, and pass the complete beacon ID to your club app.

The club app will then notify the club’s servers that it has picked up one of their beacons, and pass along the ID along with the Member ID to identify the member walking in. The club servers, which have full maps of all beacon locations, will match the Beacon ID with the correct club and will take appropriate action. In this example, passing the first entryway beacon will simply set a state of Check-In Pending 1 (first beacon). If no further beacons are found, it will time out and reset to Not Present.

When the user passes into the second entryway beacon, the club server will set the users’s state to Check-in Pending 2, indicating they are likely entering the club. Upon walking into reception, the server will set the condition to Checked In and notify the user’s app that the user is now in the club.

At this point, your club app could personalize to that specific club location automatically, if so designed. It can also be used to push announcements and notifications. An example might be to notify the user a new Group Fitness class is starting in 5 minutes, to get them interested in changing their routine. It can also be used to signal the member’s smart watch to begin recording a workout.

The message sequence diagram below, simplified, visually shows the process described above.

When the user leaves the facility, they pass through the beacon fields in reverse, and the process reverses itself. When the user checks out, the workouts are logged, the facility has duration of stay, and if they were wearing a smart watch that was equipped to record workouts, they will get the workout data.

This is a bit simplified, but conveys the gist of the system. It provides a way to automatically detect when a member comes in to work out, record the workout, and check them out- all automatically. What they do when they enter this Immersive Space is unknown for the moment, since we have only equipped the club with entry and exit detection- the Digital Doorway. We at least know they are in the club. We’ll dive in deeper for a more articulated version in the near future.