The Diamond Suit project has evolved from its original
vision of being an interface that is used as a recreational personal
trainer to being a rehabilitation devise that both physicians and patients
can easily use for upper body injuries.
Early Stages of Development
The inspiration for our project came from the recent
craze of getting in shape that has been everywhere from infomercials
to magazines to videos. There has been a huge influx of gym memberships
all across the nation and the desire to obtain the perfect physique
has grown to all-time high levels. Women want flat stomachs and defined
gluts, while men want chiseled stomachs and defined biceps. For example,
the online site for Men’s Health magazine1 bears the picture of
a cover that has the headline “Beat Fat for Good”, right
above an ad for a book called “the Abs Diet” and a picture
of a completely defined male stomach. So, we went along with the popularity
of working out and with workout routines that produce the results that
people would like to attain.
The first idea that we came up with was a device that was an electronic
personal trainer. Our concept was to create a progressive workout structure
and monitoring system that simulated a human personal trainer, without
the vocal coaching and ability to spot a person. The software was to
be loaded onto a device that could be accessed at your local gym by
a small card attached to your key chain. The idea was that each time
the user went to the gym, they would scan their individual card and
the system would generate a workout for that day based on the frequency
the person had been going to the gym, the weight they had been lifting,
and the muscle groups that had been used most frequently. For example,
the idea may be to increase the weight after a week or two for each
muscle group; however, if a person went to the gym back-to-back days,
the muscles worked each day would vary, exactly like a real workout
would be designed. This workout would be printed out on a sheet of paper
that would make it easy for the person working out to carry around.
We were very interested in following through on this idea until we discovered
that a group last semester came up with a very similar product, the
Digital Personal Trainer2. Although our idea
did not originate or borrow any ideas from this previous project, we
decided that our group had to come up with an original concept. Our
ideas slowly evolved from a software system that you only needed a small
keychain card for to a small PDA device. The device would be small and
portable and would provide not only the information our previous idea
had, but also charts and history of previous workouts and progress.
Also, since we figured out that the idea of a personal trainer was not
original, we moved towards a different concept.
Diamond Suit Creation
Our final idea that we decided on was a PDA-like device that was to
be used in conjunction with a skin-tight, long-sleeved upper-body suit,
similar to Under Armour®3. However, instead
of being a personal trainer, our system was to act like a rehabilitation
specialist. This role is similar to the previous idea we had of a personal
trainer but with a greater focus on the rebuilding of a particular muscle
back to its original strength. We decided to implement sensors that
would monitor muscle strength and the user’s vitals throughout
the upper-body suit. The sensors would send information to the PDA device
that would monitor and track the progress of the user as well as keep
the information mentioned earlier, such as charts and overall progress
of the rehabilitation progress.
The final piece to our product was a way of transferring information
to the PDA-like device in order for the patient to know what their workouts
should consist of each day. Since the person rehabilitating would be
seeing a physical therapist, we decided to create an interface for them,
as the doctor, to create the workout and transfer it to the PDA device
the patient would be using. They would be able to select the individual
workouts and details of each workout, and using this information, the
patient could work out with a digital trainer, similar to our original
idea.
Influential Products
We developed the original idea of sensors to monitor the body of the
user from the M3 Rigid Body Vest used by the Colonial Marines4. The
vest has a biomonitor that “picks up EEG, EKG, respiratory rate,
circulation functioning and visual acuity4.”
This gave us the idea to monitor the vitals of the user, since we knew
it is a technology that is in use in the marines. The vitals of the
user are important to know at all times so they know their heart rate
during their workout, as well as other information such as blood pressure
that help track the overall health of the operator.
The idea to monitor the muscles of the upper body as well as the vitals
described was an idea that was to make our product very unique and clearly
separate it from any other digital personal trainers or anything similar.
The use of sensors to monitor a muscle was used in a case when a person
had a paralyzed leg5. Sensors were used to monitor
the muscles in the good leg to help give cues for the paralyzed leg
to follow in order to allow proper movement such as walking to occur.
Based from this muscle sensor system came the idea to monitor a muscle’s
strength that we added to the existing technology.
After the ideas for the body suit, sensors, and the functionality of
the sensors came the development of the user interface for the PDA device
that the rehabilitation client would use. The design was to be a simple
yet multi-functional system that the user could learn easily while having
a whole host of information at their disposal. Also, an important implementation
factor was the size of the interface we had to work with. Since the
screen would be a small one on a PDA-like device, we had to be very
creative to maintain the user friendliness while not losing any of the
functionality we were planning to implement. We used some products currently
on the market to give us an idea of where we could go with the interface
and also how we could improve what already exists. Such products were
CrossTrainer Fitness Software6 and FitnessBliss
Fitness Software7.
