vFit
vFit is a personal gym assistant powered by voice-activated wearable technology. Professional gyms can outfit their equipment with vFit sensors and provide body monitoring vFit armbands as a personalized amenity to their members.
Each vFit armband comes with a set of microphone-equipped earbuds hooked into a voice user interface and functions as a personal gym assistant that can…
- provide instructions explaining how to use an exercise machine or piece of gym equipment
- track the user’s workouts over time, including body metrics, sets, reps, and weight used at each exercise station
- recommend a workout plan for the day, tailored to the user’s fitness goals and prior workouts
- provide guidance through a single exercise or an entire workout from warm-up to cooldown
- select music with a beat that matches the target pace during an exercise
My team conducted a literature review of voice user interfaces, directed storytelling interviews and direct observation to learn first-hand about user needs and expectations in the context of a gym workout, and an analysis of competitors’ products in the areas of wearable devices, mobile training apps, web-based training services, and technology-guided workouts. In synthesizing our research, we created a model of different people’s learning styles in a gym, identified opportunities for system features, and brainstormed scenarios of use.
We tested variations on our concept in a real gym with volunteers and refined the system’s information architecture based on our findings. During our usability testing, we encountered a major challenge in communicating exercise instructions without a visual guide to accompany the verbal descriptions. Had the project specification not constrained us to a solution driven purely by a voice-user interface, on-demand instructional video clips could have been a valuable complementary feature. Such videos could be either delivered via the wearable vFit device or through networked video displays throughout the gym.
The video sketch below shows a few scenarios of use:
Individual Contributions
- literature review
- competitive analysis
- user research
- persona and scenario development
- usability testing
- video sketch production (script and storyboard for Jen’s scenarios, photography, audio recording)
Project Details
Course
Basic Interaction Design, Fall 2009
Duration
4 weeks
Team Members
Marcus Perez-Cervantes
Kim Dowd
Adam Howard