15-February-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper
The Connected Gym: Tier 2- Adding Beacons
In the last article, we discussed the first step towards setting up a Connected Gym- automating check-in and adding a few beacons to the entrance to facilitate that. We are going to take that one step further. We will extend that concept in this article by taking what we already know about beacons and check-in and applying it to the rest of the gym.
Most clubs have the same generalized areas, in varying configurations. They’ll have a weight room, a cardio fitness area, an area with cable weight machines, at least one group fitness room, and locker rooms. Many have pools, day care, and more group fitness rooms. Some have spas, yoga rooms, pilates rooms, etc… Some clubs are small, some are giant. Most are all variations on the basic idea, however.
State of the Art, Today
Before we go into details, let’s take a look at the state of the art today. The best solution I’ve seen is Myzone, which does a great job of quantifying a workout and identifying to the club the area of the area in which you’re working out. I use a Myzone heart rate strap, shown to the right. I love it- the accuracy, 2-hour buffer, and the MEPs- Myzone Effort Points, are addicting. They have a gamification element which is a great motivator to push yourself harder. They also integrate with leaderboards in the rooms, and normalize workouts across age and gender ranges. The HR monitors have both a Bluetooth radio as well as an ANT+ radio, a standard in use in cardio equipment and in clubs that use the system. The Bluetooth radio talks to your phone or smart watch, while the ANT+ radio talks to the club. ANT+ has some benefits over Bluetooth, though with newer revisions, Bluetooth is catching up.
In the rest of this article, we are going to discuss building a framework for detailed workout capture, and can incorporate Myzone if you have a Myzone system in your club already. The addition of a smart watch also has a 24/7 aspect- the ability to measure outside of the club, daily activity, time sedentary, sleep, etc… That will be the subject of a future article.
Beacon Coverage
The previous article only covered check-in with beacons. and the new check-out capability that comes with it. This generic layout takes the Connected Gym a step farther. The blue gradated zones indicate beacon RF fields. Beacons, as explained before, are simple Bluetooth emitters. They broadcast an ID and specific information to identify the vendor they are designed to work with (in a club, it could be any solution provider in the future from Pear Sports to Motionsoft to Salesforce and everything in between that choose to support them).
Beacons have a limited radius that is settable, and good design for non-square areas should probably spread a few around to thoroughly cover the area. If they overlap with other rooms a bit, and that’s OK. Power levels can be used to clear it up. Small beacons are deployed at doors to detect someone entering or leaving a room, which helps clearly identify where exactly a person is in these overlap zones.
As the member moves to different areas to work out, each area has limitations on what the member can do in that area. In free weights, it’s weight lifting. In the cardio room, it’s cardio. There are about 5 major types of machines in cardio and it is fairly easy to tell them apart using accelerometers.
Group fitness room number combined with calendar data makes it easy to precisely identify which class I took. You get the picture- each rooms provides a limiting context that allows the watch to more correctly identify the workout type and record it as such, all without any user interaction whatsoever.
Let’s explore each area of a hypothetical connected gym.
Cardio
Cardio is a popular workout. The most common pieces of equipment are treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes, rowing machines and perhaps a few StairMasters. There are others of course as well that you may have.
Depending on how new your equipment is, and how premium it is, it may have NFC and Bluetooth connectivity. There is also ANT+, but outside of Heart Rate Monitors, it is rarely used.
Newer units can pair with phones and smart watches pretty easily. For those machines, tracking is as simple as it gets. The machine transmits the type of machine, the type of workout, and the intensity. Alternately, if the user uses the handheld heart rate monitor that is built in, that will be sent as well. If the user is wearing a watch or a heart rate strap, the phone or watch will transmit that to the machine. It’s a beautiful integration and neatly captures a very accurate workout. Case closed.
And then there are the rest of the clubs, the budget clubs, local chains, lower end branches. Give or take, cardio equipment has about a 7-year life in a club. They have not been making machines with the capability to connect to phones and watches for all that long, and there are plenty of machines out there. There are add-on modules to enable older machines to pair, but I don’t know that they are all that commonly used.
Lower end clubs and cheaper clubs may have even older equipment. I work out at 24 Hour Fitness in Santa Cruz. It’s small, the equipment is very old. Some of it has broken knobs. Some of it is off-brand. It’s all beat up. Despite the tattered and torn feel of the gym, I absolutely love it- and that will be the subject of a future article. đ But there is not a connectable machine on site.
Enter beacons. Each piece of cardio equipment has a very distinct motion signature that your watch can pick up and differentiate. With 4, 5 or maybe 6 possible patterns to mach, it’s quite easy to figure out what you are doing. And it will work on the cheapest or most expensive machine on the market. VoilĂ - a low end club just got fancy.
With cardio covered, and a club app with a wearable component, you can automatically tag that workout and record it both in the club’s logs as well as the users health app- be it AppleHealth, Samsung Health or GoogleFit.
Weights and Selector Machines
In a similar way, the weight room is âripe for disruptionâ, to use Silicon Valley-speak. While itâs an overused term, the weight rooms stands to gain the most from becoming connected.
While we can track cardio easily with newer equipment, weights are the hardest to quantify*. Nothing is high tech. In an advanced system, they can be tracked at different levels, but for starters, simply identifying that you are in the weight room is a very good start. In many tracking apps, Weights are an option to track, if you go in and manually select it. This can be automated with beacons.
Simply identifying that the user is lifting weights is a big improvement. It’s one of the least-tracked workouts. The only tracking I ever see in the weight room is the occasional notebook. I have a friend that uses Fitbod and loves it. The app will come up with personalized workouts based on your goals, or you can set up your own routine. But you have to manually start it, and you have to manually log that you did the sets. There is a lot of friction in that and it’s something that has tended to put me off. I want to lift weights, but I have my own methods and sometimes equipment is in use and I have to substitute. For now I will setting with something simple- just tag weightlifting and approximate calorie burn.
Taking It further, you can use motion analysis to get a lot more detailed view of what exactly the member is doing- what workouts are the doing. Biceps/Triceps? Chest? Deadlifts?
I donât advocate actual rep counting since it can be error prone, and if the count is off, the user wonât be happy. This sort of capability would “close the loop” with an app such as Fitbod, with a bit of fuzziness to account for slightly inaccurate rep counting.
An advantage to silent rep counting is that behind the scenes, you have a more accurate accounting of the workout intensity.
Finally, detailed motion analysis can determine adherence to good form, and detect if the user has bad form. Such data can be used to inform the user, via a form score, how well they are benefitting, injury risk, and suggest they seek out a Personal Trainer to give them some training to be more effective with their workouts. It can also notify the club that they have a candidate that would benefit from Personal Training.
*There is a solution by ShapeLog that allows you to clamp a sensor on the cable and associating it with a particular machine. By measuring the tension in the cable and the motion, the sensor can transmit to your phone (or wearable) both the number of plates the member is lifting as well as the rep count and speed.
Group Fitness, Yoga, Pilates
Group Fitness is another area that can greatly benefit from a few simple elements in a Connected Gym. While wearing a Heart Rate strap or a wearable can quantify effort and calorie burn for a group fitness workout, the member will not actually see in their workout history that they did any group fitness.
A few beacons in your Group Fitness studios extends the autotagging of workouts to group exercise. If the watch/phone pick up from the beacons that I am in Studio #2 at 11am, a simple lookup on the club calendar can identify the exact class they are taking. Now, the exercise record can reflect that the user worked out hard to a Les Mills Body Pump class, or a Zumba class.
Individual Sports
Individual sports are pretty well tracked on wearables in particular. They all have run, cycle and swim tracking, both built in as well as 3rd party support apps like Strava and FITIV. However, it is manually engaged or automatically detected. In either case, it’s not typically data the Club gets. By extending beacons to the pool area, climbing walls, and other areas, you can automate tracking and remove friction. Additionally, you’ll have a workout record, that you can present your members with a complete history of their workouts.
This second phase of the Connected Gym can bring you a lot of insight into your member’s fitness journey, and allow you to both refine your offering, while opening up new avenues to offer new product and opportunities to these members. There will be a Connected Gym: Part 3 article in the near future that will go one level deeper using advanced analytics and better motion analysis, which I have alluded to above.