Student hackers figure out how to stop gym cheats

If you’re one of those people who checks into gym, has a cup of coffee, and leaves just to get your medical aid points, you might want to start altering your behaviour. A group of Johannesburg-based hackers have figured out a way to show exactly how much exercise people do while they’re at the gym.

According to press release sent to Memeburn, five young hackers have demonstrated how exercise machines can “tell” a gym goer’s mobile phone just how much exercise really happened in-between gym entry and exit. The mobile phone then “tells” the wellness programme’s computers what is really going on.

The group came up with the solution at the Discovery GradHack Hackathon held at the JoziHub in Milpark from 27 to 29 July. The team, which goes by the name ‘Red Hot Techie Peppers’, are all third-year software engineering students from the University of Johannesburg, walked away the overall winners.

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They demonstrated a working fully-integrated industry-level project centred on a cloud database with a back-end API within the cut-off time.

“We think the tech we used was a big reason why we won. We could show everyone how swiping an Android phone on a machine’s NFC tag fed the exercise stats into our live website feed. They could see a live dashboard of exercise stats on the mobile Android app as well as the browser front-end,” says Michael Brooke, co-leader of the student team.

“It was intimidating walking into the GradHack,” admits Michael Brooke, co-team lead for Red Hot Techie Peppers. “A lot of the other teams had their Honours [degrees] already and we didn’t know what technologies they had up their sleeve.”

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The five had walked into the challenge self-taught on mobile development and the languages they used. According to UJ lecturer Frans Blauw, that’s because their UJ course emphasizes the principles of software engineering and design techniques.

“Using these principles and techniques for desktop development, they can then go out, learn any language and build a system,” he said. “The software world changes so quickly, we can’t teach them everything. They learn to go and find out instead.”

According to Blauw, competing in a hackathon is also a good proxy for working in industry:

“You need to be able to adapt to your environment. Let’s face it, when you go work for a new company or on a new system, you have to adapt to their processes. And you need to be able to work under pressure in a team and not get too grumpy towards each other: a hackathon is about being thrown in the deep end.”