Leading an Australian change in developing new technologies for the gym is Sydney-based Activintel.
The company’s software utilises machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse a person’s activity in the gym to build an understanding of their weight lifting, training and exercise technique.
For the end user they can track their data mid-workout and their progression over time.
In this conversation we spoke to their co-founder Tyson McCarthy.
You’ve been in the market for how long?
Tyson McCarthy: “We’ve been developing the technology for about nine to 10 months and in the past four months we’ve become very strategic about getting out there and talking to potential customers and stakeholders within the industry.”
What is your potential market? You’ve mentioned strength and conditioning coaches, high performance, professional sports team but what other insights you can give for what markets your business can operate in?
TM: “Definitely professional sports and professional sports in the gym, anything that is using current tracking tools be it GPS or different data science tools we want to replicate that for the gym for those types of professional and elite teams.”
Have you been able to benchmark different kinds of movements and athletes?
TM: “We can benchmark movement, speed and velocity just using images. There are current bar devices and different attachments that measures velocity of the bar, so we can start to do that with an image seamlessly.”
Lastly, the overused term ‘disruption’ applies to your company in this instance so how are you disrupting the gym environment and what does that mean to the business?
TM: “The thing I allude to is Fitbit and GPS, anyone who is a runner can measure their run and talk about the pace they ran at, even the most amateur runners. We would like people to see their data in the gym, start to compare that with their friends and benchmark their progress over time to get that live feedback in the gym which you just can’t get right now.”
A relatively young business, what does the next 12 months look like as you try and grow?
TM: “By the end of the year we’ll have something that we can put in gyms and trial and we’re looking for that first trial or development partner that can help out with some of the costs and in 2020 we need to drive revenue.”
Interview produced in collaboration with Qatar Sports Tech.
