An athlete's health data should live in one place, and it should work for them. We centralize that data — and engineer the devices that feed it.
What separates Fitness Tech from a typical student club is that we ship. Members don't just learn about technology in the abstract — they prototype custom hardware, write production firmware, design PCBs, train models, and build a mobile app that real users have downloaded. The organization runs like a startup engineering team: structured project teams, staged hardware pipelines, weekly deliverables, and a roadmap pointed at validated devices and published research.
Wearables track biometrics but don't know what you ate. Nutrition apps log meals but can't see how your body is performing. Hydration is a manual guess most people abandon within days. Each product captures one slice of an athlete's life and ignores the rest — and most lock that slice behind a subscription.
Data lives in five apps that don't talk to each other. Nothing connects last night's sleep, this morning's hydration, and today's drop in output — so the athlete never learns why performance moved.
No affordable way to see a roster in one view. Lab-grade athlete monitoring exists but is priced for professional programs, not student teams, club sports, or small gyms. Training decisions get made on gut feel when the data to do better already exists — just in ten different places.
Commercial devices are black boxes. You can't see how data is processed, can't customize what's tracked, and can't use them to answer new questions. There is no accessible, open platform for studying how health data actually improves training.
Plenty of products track something. Our position is different in three connected ways — and it is the combination, not any single piece, that nobody else offers.
MyFitnessTech is the center of gravity. Every device streams into it, and everything logged by hand lives alongside that. One profile, one complete picture. The app stands alone with zero hardware required — our devices just make it automatic.
We design our own hardware around the questions we want answered. When no product measures what we need, we build the sensor platform that does — so the full data pipeline stays transparent, customizable, and open to research use.
Centralized data is only valuable as insight. Our coaching layer reasons across every stream at once to surface why performance dropped, what to change, and what is working. For coaches, that same synthesis becomes roster-level visualization.
They can build any one piece — better funded and faster than we can. But the value here is the closed loop between custom hardware, a unified hub, and athlete-focused intelligence. That loop requires cross-domain hardware products serving a focused athletic audience, which does not fit billion-user product strategies or subscription models that charge you to see your own data.
A small, focused team that designs the devices, the app, and the research together can close that loop. A company assembling acquisitions cannot. Our constraint — being students with limited budget — is also what forces us to build the transparent, integrated version instead of the profitable, fragmented one.
Every Fitness Tech device starts as a research question. That ordering is deliberate: we don't build a gadget and then look for something to study — we find a gap in what existing fitness technology can measure, and build the hardware that closes it.
Something coaches or athletes need to know that no accessible product measures well.
Address it with hardware, moving through the staged pipeline.
With our own hardware and our own app — not someone else's black box.
Accuracy, correlation, and reliability across users and conditions.
Present the findings, then point what we learned at the next device.
Each one maps to a device we are building
How accurately can student-built sensors capture biometrics compared to commercial and medical-grade devices?
Can motion data from a wrist-worn IMU reliably classify exercise type and count reps across different users and different form?
How does hydration — measured automatically rather than self-reported — actually correlate with training performance?
What does a coach need to see, and at what frequency, to make better roster decisions from live athlete data?
Which combination of signals gives the earliest useful warning that an athlete is trending toward overtraining or injury?
Hands-on experience with literature review, testing protocol design, data collection, statistical analysis, and model training. We're targeting the UW Undergraduate Research Symposium and working to establish conference pathways and faculty collaborations — building a portfolio of validated, publishable work that future cohorts inherit and extend.
Our near-term effort points at UW club and varsity programs, campus recreation groups, and small training organizations — the audience where centralized data creates the most obvious value, and where the gap between what's possible and what's affordable is widest.
The approach is bottom-up and deliberately unglamorous: before designing another device, we interview coaches about what they actually want to know about their athletes. What they say determines what we build.
Discovery interviews are underway
What do you track by hand today, and what would you track if measuring it were free?
Which signals tell you an athlete is trending toward injury or burnout — and how early would you need to see them to act?
What does readiness mean in your sport, and what would you accept as a measurement of it?
How often do you want to look at data: live during practice, daily, or weekly in review?
What would make you trust a number enough to change a training plan because of it?
What would make you stop using a tool like this in week three?
A device is only worth engineering if it closes a gap a coach has told us matters
Once the streams are centralized, the useful question is no longer "what was my heart rate?" but "given everything about this athlete — their history, their sport, their goals, their last three weeks — what should change?" That synthesis is the point of centralizing in the first place, and it's what a single-purpose device can never provide.
Every device moves through the same path. Each stage validates assumptions before we commit money to the next — and each stage teaches a different set of real engineering skills. A project that fails at breadboard costs us a few weeks and some components, which is the entire reason the pipeline is staged that way.
Sensors and microcontroller wired loose; data streaming end to end. De-risks: whether the measurement is possible at all.
Soldered build in a wearable form factor, paired to the app. De-risks: whether it works off the bench, on a body.
KiCad schematic and layout, professionally fabricated and assembled. De-risks: whether it can be made repeatably and small.
3D-printed housing in Fusion 360; ergonomics and durability testing. De-risks: whether people will actually wear or carry it.
Integration, user testing, benchmarking, research data collection. De-risks: whether the numbers can be trusted.
New devices aren't chosen because the hardware is interesting — the sequence runs the other way
Genuinely multidisciplinary, not multidisciplinary in name only
Fitness Tech aims to become the University of Washington's premier student engineering organization for health technology — and, more specifically, the place where an athlete's entire data picture comes together.
The long-term goal is a self-sustaining ecosystem: successive cohorts of student engineers inherit working hardware, a live app, and active research, then push each of them further. MyFitnessTech is the constant. BioBand and SipSync are the first two devices in what we intend to be a growing portfolio, each one chosen because it fills a gap in what we can currently measure about an athlete.
Sequenced by what unlocks what — each phase depends on the one before it
Hardware costs money — we pursue several channels in parallel so no single one is load-bearing
The organization maintains a U.S. Bank account with an EIN for transparent financial management, and procurement runs through the Treasurer with documented invoices.
Health technology is one of the fastest-growing sectors in engineering, but most students don't get hands-on experience with a full-stack health device until they're already in industry. Fitness Tech closes that gap.
You graduate having designed hardware, written firmware, shipped mobile software, trained models, and run a study — a portfolio of engineering work that goes well beyond coursework.
Student innovation at its most tangible: real devices, real data, real publications, built by an RSO rather than a funded lab.
A genuine attempt at something the market hasn't delivered — a complete, affordable, transparent picture of what an athlete is actually doing.
Fitness Tech is a student-led engineering organization at UW that centralizes health data into one hub and builds the custom devices that feed it — wearables, hydration tracking, and coach-facing visualization — so athletes and their coaches can train against evidence instead of guesswork.
Open to all majors and experience levels — engineers, computer scientists, designers, researchers, kinesiology students, and business minds. The work genuinely requires all of them.
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