ActiveSync

Team Members

Team 68. Alex Chan (BCA), Brian Lim (BCA), Dominic Teo (SportsSG),Mathan Chidambaranathan (GPE), Jack Toh (GPE), Yong Bangrou (CSG)

Problem statements and problem formulation process

Irregular and beginners gym goers want to complete their workouts at ActiveSG gyms but struggle due to limited workout planning knowledge and equipment availability issues caused by overcrowding. This forces them to wait or choose less suitable machines, leading to frustration and eventual gym dropouts.

Problem Formulation Process

The original problem statement was "SportSG need to enhance individual wellness & health through personalisation, and boost engagement for citizens". To ensure our problem statement accurately reflects real user challenges, team has conducted user research and engaged with SportSG stakeholders to gain deeper insights into on-the-ground issues.

User Research Methods

• Interview with Adam, ActiveSG Gym Zonal Lead (North East): to gain an in-depth understanding of on-the-ground issues affecting gym user engagement and retention
• Online survey with responses from 50 existing/previous ActiveSG Gym users: to capture a broad perspective on user experiences and identify prevalent pain points
• In-depth user interviews: To delve deeper into individual experiences and uncover nuanced challenges, and to map out a Customer Journey Map

Key Discoveries

Through above methods, we discovered the following:

• Initial Focus: The original problem statement emphasized personalization and engagement without a clear connection to real user pain points.
• Research Findings: Showed that overcrowding, lack of guidance, and workout inefficiency were the primary causes of disengagement.
• Final Refinement: Shifted from broad personalization to addressing real barriers—overcrowding, workout adaptability, and lack of structured guidance—to ensure gym-goers remain engaged and avoid dropout

Based on above findings, we envision that the problem statement can be addressed by providing a solution to assist gym users to complete their workouts even in a crowded gym with 2 key feature sets:

Providing Real-Time Equipment Tracking

We believe that developing a system to monitor and display real-time equipment usage will help users plan workouts efficiently, reducing idle time and frustration. Interviews revealed that overcrowding and uncertainty about equipment availability disrupt routines and decrease motivation.

Offering Workout Plan and Alternate Exercise Options

We believe that educating users on versatile exercises will help them maintain effective workouts even when machines are occupied. Survey data shows 52% still struggle with workout planning, so offering guidance can boost confidence and consistency.

Details on your solution

ActiveSync is a unique solution to provide the following main feature sets:

• Track equipment usage time and availability
• Recommend workout exercises and equipment to be used to achieve workout objectives
• Track user's workout statistics to see improvements and progress
• Monitor workout form to provide feedback and suggestion to improve workout efficiency

ActiveSync consists of 2 main components to achieve above feature sets:

1. A workout sensor (gyroscope, accelerometer, NFC, Bluetooth) that will be issued to the users (and paired to user mobile phone), which this will attach to the exercise equipment when users start the exercise. The sensor is a versatile sensor that can be attached to wide variety of equipment, and the sensor will capture the progress and exercise data and send to the Workout Recommendation App
2. A web-based or mobile app that will allow user personalization of their workout objectives, recommend exercises with associated equipment availability, as well as tracking the workout statistics performed by the user through data generated by the sensor.

Impact and outcomes analysis of your solution

Based on our analysis, we foresee that our solution would help to alleviate the waiting time for the equipment and improve the user's workout efficiency by:

1. With our solution to report the availability of the equipment at real-time, user can know the which equipment is available by looking at the display in the gym or via an app.
2. Alternative workout exercise or structured programme recommend to the user to help them achieve their goal via the app. The recommendation can help to control the traffic to avoid many users waiting for the same equipment together with the feature implemented mentioned in point 1.
3. User will become more motivated with the ability to see their progress made via the app. This will encourage them to come to the gym more often or "glorify" their achievements posted to social media, e.g. number of laps done on that day.
4. By capturing the data (via Bluetooth or wifi) from the sensor, the app can monitor the workout form, analyse and provide suggestion to improve the user's form and prevent injury.

By adopting our solution, we believe the irregular and beginner gym goers will be engaged and motivated to come to the gym regularly.

Future steps for your project

The current prototype needs further developments into a functional MVP in order to trial by beginners and irregular gym users in a selected ActiveSG Gym. The trial will validate the hypothesis that such a solution will help these users stay engaged with ActiveSG Gym and increase their patronship.

A minimum trial period of 6 months is proposed to be able to recruit enough gym users to understand if there is a positive impact of behavioural changes with the solution.

The following will be a list of features that is to be developed into the MVP, which is estimated to take around 3 months with a team consisting of a Product Manager, a UX/UI designer, an IoT engineer and a full stack developer (or 1 front-end & 1 back-end developers):

• Partner with certified fitness trainer to provide more comprehensive workout permutations and plans
• Integration with cardio machines (eg treadmill) and/or users' own smart watches/exercise trackers to sync workout data
• Design and build sensors with smaller form factors integrating multiple components (battery, NFC), with mounting kits to different types of gym equipment, and program to track different exercises and forms