august 2015

Wearable Technology x Accessibility x Fitness

 

The Wheelchair Fitness Tracker is a solution to a coworker’s problem.  Tyler is paralyzed from the waist down.  At the time, there was no fitness tracker available that fit the movements of a wheelchair user.  So, we set out to build one.

 

The fitness tracker had to be easily deployable, take enough metrics to understand user performance, and incorporate many of the same features as other fitness trackers currently on the market.  We designed the tracker to be mounted beneath the wheelchair.  It needed to sense speed, acceleration, revolutions per wheel and heart rate.  By analyzing the user's movements, we expanded the feature set to allow one revolution sensor per wheel in order to monitor increases in user activity as the user moves through varying terrains.

 

The fitness tracker went through two iterations: the first sat on the crossbar and the second was a more modular adaptable pod that mounted still on the cross bar but accounted for different wheelchair designs.  The system consisted of a Teensy microcontroller, two hall effect sensors, a BLE module for connecting to our app and an inertial measurement unit featuring a 3 axes magnetic, accelerometer, and gyroscope.

 

The Wheelchair Fitness Tracker received a large amount of press including 10,000 video views on Vimeo and Youtube combined.  The Wheel Chair Fitness Tracker won the Grand Prix Award at the 2016 Dadi Awards.

 

 

Patent Pending.