Gym-goers trying to pick a good time to make the trek over to the athletic complex can now check the availability of Cousens Gym equipment on a new website, Cardibo.com.
Cardibo, which uses vibration censors embedded in the exercise machines to identify when equipment is in use, went live in the middle of last month, according to co-founders Rameen Aryanpur and Jackson Dolan, both of whom are in their fifth year of a joint master's and Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering program.
The website features a layout of the gym floor plan, indicating which machines are open and how long unavailable machines have been occupied. The "trends" feature uses historical data to predict how crowded the gym will be at a given time of day.
Sensors embedded in the machine respond to vibrations and transmit the data online, Dolan said. The website currently only displays information about the use of the treadmill machines, but developers are in the process of hooking up the bikes and ellipticals to the monitoring technology.
The idea for the project grew out of a mechanical engineering senior design class that Aryanpur and Dolan took last fall. They realized the project they were working on could satisfy a real student demand.
"A lot of times I'd go [to the gym] and it would be really crowded," Aryanpur said. "I'd have to wait 15 to 20 minutes, which isn't that big of a deal, but when you have a class in an hour from then it can really mess up your schedule."
After a brief hiatus during the spring semester, progress on the project restarted this past summer, Aryanpur said.
"We ran data tests, seeing how well the server handles the load and how long the battery life is," Dolan said.
Two months later, Cardibo passed a two-week trial period with no complications, Aryanpur said.
Dolan cited services, such as the JoeyTracker and LaundryView, which show students which laundry machines in the dormitories are in use, as their inspirations.
The project was entirely independently funded, Aryanpur said. He noted that the Athletics Department was highly receptive to the new program.
Marten Vandervelde (LA '08), a temporary employee in the Athletics Department, said the program will benefit those students who prefer to exercise when the gym is unoccupied.
"I wonder what brings people to the gym, and what scares people away, and I wonder if the general business plays an effect one way or another," Vandervelde said. "There are people who don't want to be seen by a soul."
He predicts that Cardibo will be most useful to casual gym-goers.
"The people who go to the gym are a wide array — the regulars are probably never going to use it," Vandervelde said. "The people who are on the fence, and the people who have never been there, maybe that will be it."
The future of Cardibo, Dolan and Aryanpur said, is contingent on student response.
"We want to do as much for Tufts as we can and we'll see how it is," Aryanpur said. "If it's well-received, expanding it [to other schools and commercial gyms] would be great."
The founders are considering the launch of a comprehensive predictive system, which would use past data collected to forecast when specific machines will be in use in the future, Dolan said. The program's accuracy would increase as it collects more statistics.
"Cardibo will tell you how long someone's on the machine for and how long they will be on for — that's the utility of it," Aryanpur said.
