TrainAround
Monitoring Athletes Workout Using a BLE Star Topology Network with Android.
TrainAround introduces a service that lets a trainer control the training status of a group of athletes in real-time.
Current solutions
The most common approach nowadays for workout tracking consists in Wearable apps that run directly on the wearable device and let you access the device’s services all on the device itself.
Fitness apps are designed specifically to assist with exercise, other types of physical training, or related fitness topics. The purpose of those fitness app is to provide the user with instructions and examples of one or more types of exercise, physical activity, record statistics on workouts or collect data on walks, or some other fitness topic.
Anyway, all these applications suffer from the impossibility for a trainer to monitor in real time the workout sessions of many athletes, instead of just one.
Most of the time, in real life sport-scenarios, it would be interesting to change the perspective from 1:1 (Athlete self-checking his/her own statistics) to One-to-Many (Trainer supervising his/her Athletes’ statistics).
Also, for those apps that lets users to connect to a personal trainer to share statistics about fitness routine, the delivery of the latter is asynchronous. Thus, they miss an on-thefly monitoring feature that could let the trainer to track more effectively the session.
In addition to that, existing workout tracking apps running on smartphones cannot accurately sense user activities when the phone is placed away from the user, or just become unhandy if they require the phone to be attached to the body.
Characteristics of TrainAround
We instead developed an application that collects data from multiple Wear OS smartwatches and shows the collected information from all the smartwatches on one central Android device, which is supposed to be the coach / trainer device.
The aim is to find a lightweight solution that does not need the presence of the smartwatches’ paired phones, so that the monitored users do not have to bring their phones with them.
The other requirement is to avoid the use of internet, so that the application could work even in remote areas or where there is no Wi-Fi hotspot for the smartwatches.
So, from a technical point of view our work consists in creating a local area network between one android device (acting as a server / central node) and multiple Android Wear OS devices acting as clients / sensors.
TrainAround was thought to be addressed for the track and field world, where the presence of small groups of athletes and their coaches would actually take advantages from using it.
TrainAround is Open Source
You can find the complete code of both trainer and athlete apps in this repo.