Team FormCheck wins crowd favorite honor at ECE Design Day

Having people vote for their favorite projects has turned into one of the fun traditions of ECE’s Design Day. In previous years it has sometimes been pretty clear which group would win, but not this time. There were simply too many outstanding projects, and the public saw it that way, as close to every group received at least one vote.

Though the votes were spread out, one group did emerge with the most: Team FormCheck, which was comprised of incoming seniors Travis Chan, Jack Ravekes and Luke Robinson!

FormCheck is a system that detects errors in people’s form during strength training exercises. When the user improperly lifts, FormCheck will give audio feedback to notify the user on how to correct their form. FormCheck reduces training injuries, chronic diseases later in life by encouraging people to exercise, and financial costs related to hiring personal trainers.

The system consists of an Xbox One Kinect 3D depth camera to measure and calculate the positions of the squatters’ joints, a balance platform with custom electronics underneath to provide weight distribution data for the program running on the computer, and a computer to process the data and give the squatter feedback on his/her form. Using the positions of the joints and the weight distribution of the person, the program is able to tell when the user has started/stopped squatting and relatively how far the joints have deviated from that of a perfect squat.

“Being selected as the crowd favorite gives me confidence that there’s a real need for improving people’s exercise form and that our prototype shows promise in providing a technological solution towards this problem,” Chan said. “I am planning to further develop this concept over the summer as a side project and we’ll see if it goes anywhere.”

Congratulations to Team FormCheck!