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Reaction Trainer Mobile App

Programmed and built on: 23/03/2021

With the Coronavirus not likely to disappear anytime soon, and the fear of contracting the virus is still looming, many people have taken to gymming and working out from the comfort of their own homes. That's right people, humanity finally realised you don't need to spend unnecessary fees on your New Year's resolutions but can rather maintain the promise to themselves and work out at home doing a variety of exercises with minimal equipment. Now before you are all up in arms against me, yes Josh I know you live in the gym, working out at home isn't for everyone.

Honestly, I've grown quite accustomed to it, and I'm not going to lie, I actually have a fairly decent setup in my room. I have kettle bells, steppers, a TRX bar, a free standing boxing bag and most recently and ingeniously by my own thinking, a brand spanking new custom shoe cabinet. Now now, before you all are confused as to how I have all this equipment and wonder how I am as plump as a partridge, honest answer is I am just lazy. But in an attempt to get back into shape, and for my love of MMA I thought I would improve my boxing speed and reaction time. The question is, how does the shoe cabinet come in to play?

Simple, while standing in front of my display admiring my collection, I randomly stood in the Orthodox position, and threw a random jab-cross combo into two different squares. I then stood up straight, went back into position and threw another combo with the jab going into one high square and the cross in a lower one, and so the light bulb went off. My first thought was how it could be developed using a bunch of LEDs and an Arduino to program it. While it could be a fairly simple program to implement and circuit to build, the idea of a lot of wires running all over my display unit and basically my history with circuits during university just immediately made me say no. And so I thought what is the next best thing?

A phone app! Using Android Studio and my Note 20 Ultra, I took a shot at developing a basic interface with the following:

It's nothing to shout about but I think the following video would explain the premise better.

Truthfully, it does not look impressive, but couple this reacting exercise in an Orthodox or Southpaw stance, actually gave my heart rate a nice spike. This kind of reaction training can be implemented in a variety of manners such as the LED setup as I mentioned in the beginning, or even in some type of VR development. However, for me the next step for the app is to try and implement a more kickboxing routine to the app following a similar principle by randomizing the action that should be performed, combine that with a random number could lead to basic one-two combos up to a potential five move combo.

As someone who works within the data space, I am going to use myself as a test subject and see the type of analysis I could do given the data I can pull from the exercise and my fitness band. Till then, thank you for reading, and comments and messages are always welcome.