Green Lake Community Fitness

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Though I didn’t realize it at the time, when we transformed my local gym into a member-owned cooperative back in early 2017, it set in motion a new, high-tech model for community fitness centers that’s now used by over a thousand gyms around the country.

Like many of the other forty-thousand fitness centers in the United States, my gym, is a small business with big investments in exercise equipment it can’t afford to replace.

We wanted to use artificial intelligence to help members with their dataset workouts though, and so we worked with some local hardware engineers to build an Internet of Things layer of intelligence to rest atop our “dumb” equipment. The key hardware innovation was a low-cost ($2 a unit), commodity sensor with old-fashioned E Ink display technology (circa 2010 Amazon Kindle readers). The two-inch long sensors work in pairs: a “workout wand” carried by the gym member and a dongle that attaches to workout equipment.


When you check in at the front desk, you grab a wand that can go in your pocket or slip around your wrist. The check-in process instantly associates the wand with your gym profile, but just for the duration of the workout, so that the gym’s equipment knows you from other people in the gym.

Its display directs you each piece of equipment in the order of your workout routine for the day, mixing it up from the mind-numbing routines most of us had before this newer, smarter system. Both wand and dongle will tell you how many reps to do at each machine, and count them down for you as you do them.