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Students hack lazy gym-goers

Lauren Kate Rawlins
By Lauren Kate Rawlins, ITWeb digital and innovation contributor.
Johannesburg, 28 Aug 2015
The winning GradHAck team, left to right: Wald Bezuidenhout (back), Kyle Welsh (back), Michael Brooke (back), Waseem Nabi (front), and Ross Guy (front). (Photo by Therese van Wyk)
The winning GradHAck team, left to right: Wald Bezuidenhout (back), Kyle Welsh (back), Michael Brooke (back), Waseem Nabi (front), and Ross Guy (front). (Photo by Therese van Wyk)

It is still possible to stroll into a gym, do no exercise at all and walk out, while gaining 'points' for exercising from a health insurer's wellness programme. However, five University of Johannesburg (UJ) students have come up with a solution that forces users to sweat for the points.

The students competed with nearly 20 other teams from around the country in the Discovery GradHack Hackathon held at the JoziHub in Milpark at the end of last month. The team, 'Red Hot Techie Peppers', was the overall winner. The team demonstrated a working fully-integrated industry-level project centred on a cloud database with a back-end API within the cut-off time.

Discovery allowed participants to develop any app that would encourage people to live healthier lives. The winning team chose to solve the 'gym-dodging problem'.

How the app works:

1. The gym-goer will use their regular membership card or chip to get into the gym.
2. The user will swipe their phone across the exercise equipment they choose to use and the app will log kilometres done and calories burned.
3. The app also connects to wearables, so if the user decides to do a class, the app will register their heart rate is rising and log it.
4. The app will then correlate with the gym's card or chip system to see if the exercise took place at the gym, and points will be awarded accordingly.

"We think the tech we used was a big reason why we won. We could show everyone how swiping an Android phone on a machine's NFC tag fed the exercise stats into our live Web site feed. They could see a live dashboard of exercise stats on the mobile Android app as well as the browser front-end," says Michael Brooke, co-leader of the student team.

The team members are all third-year software engineering students, and self-taught in the languages and mobile developments they used to develop the winning app.

"It was intimidating walking into the GradHack," admits Brooke. "A lot of the other teams had their Honours [degrees] already and we didn't know what technologies they had up their sleeve."

UJ teaches principles and foundations; however, the students are required to teach themselves usage and semantics of particular languages, says Frans Blauw, lecturer at the UJ Academy for Computer Science and Software Engineering.

"Using these principles and techniques for desktop development, they can then go out, learn any language and build a system. The software world changes so quickly, we can't teach them everything. They learn to go and find out instead."

Competing in a hackathon is a good proxy for working in the industry, says Blauw.

The app idea and IP belongs to Discovery, but it is unclear when or if the health insurer will implement it.

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