Calling all gym rats, weightlifters and crossfit athletes: there’s finally a motion tracking device for you! Rithmio EDGE wants to help you work smarter in the gym. Paired with your Android Wear smartwatch, it detects movement and accurately quantifies your exercise to analyze your workout so you can gain insights on your progress.
The founders of Rithmio were not out to change the fitness tracking industry – it was almost discovered by accident. Adam Tilton, Rithmio CEO and Co-founder, was a PhD candidate in the Mechanical Science and Engineering program at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign when he and his graduate program advisor Dr. Prashant Mehta discovered a mathematical breakthrough in signal processing and classification. It wasn’t until they went through an academic bootcamp, though, that they uncovered a real value in their math. While Tilton and Dr. Mehta worked to develop technology for missile guidance, they found it was exceptionally useful for gesture recognition in wearable devices. So they went about creating solutions that improve the ability to understand sensor movement. And that’s when Tilton and Dr. Mehta co-founded Rithmio.
Rithmio works with wearable devices to track movement using sensor data from accelerometers and gyroscopes, which are found in all major consumer electronics. Smartwatches and fitness bands become even smarter when integrated with Rithmio’s motion recognition software. The EDGE application, which can be downloaded for free from Google Play, learns your exercises and your form to provide exercise-level analytics on your progression. Additionally, EDGE can tell you your Active Time versus your Rest Time to keep you honest about how much time you are actually working out. As Tilton told me, “Going to the gym for an hour is different from working out at the gym for a straight hour.”
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
In addition to learning the exercises, automatically tracking reps and weight used in a particular exercise, and auto-populating a workout log, the app also gives insight into which muscles were targeted, how efficient the workout was – including the Active Time vs Real Time – and tracking personal records to show how you’re progressing and when you’re at risk for stagnating.
Rithmio EDGE is now live on @GooglePlay! Download now: https://t.co/U7fvuQXOGt #EDGE #Androidwear #Connectedfitness pic.twitter.com/ZDssRg2zoj
— Rithmio EDGE (@RithmioEDGE) August 2, 2016
They focused their efforts on measuring progress in the gym because they saw a unique opportunity to help people by taking guesswork out of working out. It also helped that the 15-person team at Rithmio includes former high school and collegiate athletes who incorporate weight lifting into their fitness routine so “it was an interesting challenge that they could test in-house and work to evolve the product into a useful tool for the gym,” explained Tilton.
As with many wearable devices on the market now, there are limitations. Because the sensor data relies on wrist movement – which is very useful in learning, tracking and analyzing a variety of upper body, lower body and core exercises – there are some activities during which the wrist is stationary, such as leg extensions, and there isn’t sufficient motion sensor data for Rithmio to analyze. To account for this, users can manually log sets.
Rithmio is always looking to the future of wearables and Tilton says they are working with their strategic partners to enable the next generation of wearables and connected clothing that measure data from multiple points on the body.