FlexCore | Your Personal Fitness Companion

Problem Space

Our mission through this project was to create a movement assessment and companion system that actively helps community center members stick to an active lifestyle, as well as community centers, that provide access to the resources necessary, such as gyms and workout equipment, increase their member engagement, both on-premise as well as remotely.

Challenges

Our team identified some of the core reasons behind user injury and inability to stick with a wellness/fitness routine as misinformation, lack of engaging content, as well as the inability to find the time to commit to the necessary lifestyle changes.

Through our interviews with fitness professionals, many of them supported these insights as observed behavior in their clients, as well as listed them as potential reasons behind why gyms and community centers such as themselves struggle with member retention and engagement with facilities over time.

Solution

From the findings of our research, our team came up with the following solution: a fitness chatbot modeled after a trainer to help clients stay engaged and upkeep good habits throughout their whole day, rather than the minimal time they spend at the gym with their trainers. The bot would push them to do injury-prevention stretches, of which we consulted carefully with domain experts about, as well as other standard wellness reminders such as drinking water, and periodical relief from nonstop screen interactions.

We were able to create an entire modular design system that allowed any organization or platform (and users!) to create their own look-alike avatars, which through our first-hand research, was proven to increase levels of engagement between users, and their habit-formation platforms and systems. This enabled us to further personalization within a product, which we found to be a key aspect of success in habit-formation within our test users.

With these avatars, we also designed, tested, and launched a companion app that allows users to not just engage with the fitness center, our client, through an improved appointment booking and onboarding experience, but also helped streamline services for the back-end of community centers, allowing them to help support more users, more efficiently.

Research Through Design

Additionally, we leveraged different learning models and APIs in our testing, with the intent of maximizing user impact while minimizing friction between the user’s schedule and the new changes they are attempting to adopt in their lifestyles. We experimented with haptic-based notifications, leveraging Google calendar schedules, and consulted sales experts on the statistical success rates of time-based notifications.

Want to see more?

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