SportPlus

The SportPlus app enables smooth and flawless connection with workout equipment, allowing for personalized exercise routines.

Modern technologies reshape the fitness industry, creating new opportunities for both companies and customers. The team behind SportPlus knew it perfectly. That’s why they went for the development of a branded mobile application that would seamlessly work with their workout equipment.

The smooth connection between the app and exercise machines would help to make workouts smarter and data-driven. Apart from this, the company planned on developing unique and engaging workout routines specifically for their equipment.

Challenge

In IoT integration-based projects, one of the key challenges usually is implementing the right protocol and ensuring that it works stably. This held true here as well.

However, in the case of SportPlus, it was even trickier. In the very beginning, we expected that there would be only one protocol, meaning that all the machines work in the same way. Yet, during the development, it turned out that all the devices work inconsistently as they’re actually using 4 different BLE protocols.

Aside from the technical aspect, we had to implement advanced features to improve the overall user experience. The app should allow users to actively manage their workouts, including the ability to track the progress of their active workout, monitor its milestones and key statistics, and adjust the difficulty level.

Process

Stormotion was the key technical partner for the SportPlus project. To address the challenges mentioned above, we created a team of a Tech Lead and 3 developers, a QA engineer and a Project Manager.

Before starting off the development, we held a Discovery Stage. It helped us to validate the BLE protocol we’d integrate on this project as well as design the UX.

Solution

As we’ve stumbled upon the challenge of multiple protocol usage and machines inconsistency, we had to find an effective solution to address it quickly. For this purpose we create a generic protocol handler. It generated necessary protocol configurations that should remove inconsistency and enable the application to communicate with all exercise machines via BLE.

While focusing a lot on the technical side of the SportPlus app, we didn’t forget about user-friendliness. The active workout functionality was made very clear and accessible so as to make it easy to use for people during intense exercise. We maintained minimalist design while providing all the necessary info on the screen with an ability to easily manage it.

We also successfully implemented the custom workouts functionality, creating a CMS system that enables the SportPlus team to manage content that adds value for device owners. This system allows the team to upload and update custom workouts for customers on their own.