Power Tower Analytics

Power Tower Analytics gathers data from the swimmer's phone and translates to a dashboard that the coach or athlete can use to track progress and set up specific workouts.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for this challenge was to automate data coming from the Power Tower. We wanted to make sure it was user-friendly so that coaches and swimmers could have access to the data. The data collected would be able to inform the coaches of more effective training and help to improve the efficiency of workouts.

What it does

This technology uses the barometric pressure data to read the distance the bucket has traveled, and how fast it is being pulled. This data allows us to extract speed, power, and other metrics to better inform future workouts.

How We built it

We used the barometric reader on a modern smartphone to measure the distance of the bucket's travel over time. The smart phone will be attached underneath the bucket as an athlete performs their workout.

Challenges We ran into

Finding the best way to integrate sensors into a very wet and corrosive environment that would still give accurate data. We settled on using smartphones and creating an app to upload live barometric readings to a cloud that can be pulled into dashboards with live visualizations for coaches.

Without historical athlete data it was impossible to demonstrate any in depth data analysis beyond the summary statistics of a single workout run. Opportunities for further data analysis are demonstrated through pseudo-code and examples of clustering, forecasting, and optimization that could be accomplished given a database of historical workout metrics of multiple athletes.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

The concept of using the swimmer's phone as the sensors and data tracker. This allows the user to always be logged into their profile and doesn't require the swimmer or coach to log in or input any extra information when setting up the machine for a particular swimmer.

What We learned

For the most effective user experience, it is important to do more research on how practices are run, how the coach builds workouts, what the pain points are for all parties involved. We also learned about creating real-time graphs and how challenging that can be when the movement is very small and the sensors being used are not super-fine instruments.

What's next for Power Tower Analytics

Next steps would be to go back and do more research as mentioned above, as well as try to gather some historical data in order to debug and fine-tune the data analytics. With more data to work with, we could adjust the models and create more information screens that the athlete and coach can interact with to track their progress and adjust for future effectiveness.

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