SUSU students have developed a mobile application that will become a full-fledged fitness assistant. For amateur athletes, it will help overcome psychological discomfort in the gym and better control their training process; and for fitness clubs, it will make interaction with clients and staff members faster, more efficient and convenient.
The GymApp startup project, developed by SUSU students, is aimed at creating mobile applications for fitness centres of any scale. The main tasks of the project are to automate the work of the administration and trainers of fitness centres, as well as to help beginner athletes overcome psychological discomfort while attending a fitness club. The application will guide through the training equipment, recommend a training and nutrition plan (for example, if a client cannot afford a personal trainer) and help monitor the training progress. And if a client is exercising with a trainer, their interaction will become faster and more productive.
“This application will take a fitness club to a new level of communication with its clients and staff members, and make it psychologically easier to exercise. Besides, the club will have its own applications both for android devices and for iPhones, which will definitely improve the club’s image,” said Taisiia Kuznetsova, author of the project idea and one of the application developers, a 4th-year student of the SUSU Department of Software Engineering.
The authors of the project are currently creating a prototype of this application, which will be available on both Android and iOS. The idea with QR codes on training equipment is also being tested. By scanning the QR code, the athlete can read a web-page with all the main information about the training equipment and how to exercises on it correctly. All recommendations for training equipment were developed jointly with the SUSU Department of Physical Education and Health. Such QR codes have already appeared on the training equipment at the gym of the Institute of Sport, Tourism and Service.
At the current stage of work, due to the SUSU acceleration program and the Student Startup contest, a network of fitness clubs and fitness studios have become interested in the idea of such an application. However, as Taisiia Kuznetsova shared, there are even more ambitious plans associated with the idea of a sports application.
“In the future, we would like to create an application for the government as part of the initiatives from the Sports Is the Norm of Life National Projects, where we will pursue the goal of helping maintain health for people of different ages through sports,” said Taisiia Kuznetsova.
As part of the SUSU acceleration program, the project team received a grant of 40 thousand roubles. Also, the authors of the application are actively trying to participate with their startup in various contests and grants: for example, they applied for the Student Startup grant from the Assistance Foundation and are participating in the Startup as a Diploma contest.
South Ural State University is a university of transformations, where innovative research is conducted in most of the priority fields of science and technology development. In accordance with the strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university is focused on the development of big scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of digital industry, materials science, and ecology. In 2021 SUSU became the winner in the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university acts as a regional project office of the World-class Ural Interregional Research and Education Centre (UIREC), which is aimed at solving the tasks of the Science and Universities National Project.