Connected strength platform

Zach CardozaTulare, CA

As Integrated Technology Manager at Keiser I led engineering on the most ambitious connected-strength platform the company ever attempted. It replaced manual pressure regulators with PWM-controlled electronic air valves, ran touchscreens off Power over Ethernet, and identified members by face and fingerprint. Rep data streamed to the cloud in real time. About a hundred test units went out to U.S. Air Force Special Forces, the U.S. Army, an Olympic training center, and a handful of other research sites.

Role
Integrated Technology Manager
Employer
Keiser Corporation
Dates
2018 - 2022
Team size
7 engineers (software) plus cross-functional electrical engineering
Scale
  • ~100 test units deployed for evaluation
Outcomes
  • Deployed to U.S. Air Force Special Forces, U.S. Army, an Olympic training center, and other research sites
  • Streaming rep data architecture proven in field deployment
Tech
  • Java
  • C++
  • TypeScript
  • Vue.js
  • WebSocket
  • SQLite
  • WASM

The platform was a ground-up redesign of Keiser's strength equipment. Full-cylinder force transducers (force plus position) measured the work the user was doing in real time; a large sweat-resistant touchscreen rendered the live workout data. Custom PoE extraction boards, control boards, and high-rate analog-to-digital buffer boards supported the display's polling architecture. The touchscreen included a camera (facial recognition) and a fingerprint reader for member identification.

I served as the technical lead and a hands-on engineer through the build. The test units deployed to elite military training programs (Air Force Special Forces, U.S. Army), an Olympic training center, a North Carolina installation, and a senior-living community. A reduced variant later shipped with the new touchscreen display retrofitted onto existing equipment.

The hardest engineering problem was not the hardware. It was synchronizing the rep-data stream from the equipment with member-identity sessions in a way that survived flaky gym wifi and intermittent power. We landed on a buffered local-first model with cloud reconciliation, which is the same pattern most fitness-equipment platforms have converged on since.