Iron Mate — A Web Application To Find The Perfect Gym Buddy

This project was carried out as part of the TechLabs “Digital Shaper Program” in Düsseldorf (Summer Term 2022).

Abstract

Going to the gym can be overwhelming at first. While many people want to start getting healthy and fit, they lack the motivation and support. Iron Mate wants to make sure that they do not have to go through this by themselves. As it has been shown that working out with a friend makes it 95% more likely to reach your fitness goals.

Introduction

There are more than 184 million gym members around the world. Out of these the average gym goers keep their membership for about 4.7 years. Especially new members easily become disengaged and unmotivated and cancel their memberships within six months. Common reasons for this to happen are feeling out of place, being uncomfortable with equipment and/or having no gym buddy holding them accountable. This leads for them to lose out on the various benefits a healthy and active lifestyle can have on them. Regular exercise can help individuals to improve their mood and decrease feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress. It can boost energy levels leading to reduced feelings of fatigues, better heart and lung capacities, better brain health, and can help to work against chronic diseases. Furthermore, regular exercise helps with weight loss, supports better skin health, and promotes muscle growth. And as if the list of benefits was not long enough regular exercise improves sleep quality.
Our idea with Iron Mate is to help people to not miss out on those benefits. As we have seen the above-mentioned reasons for cancellation as solvable, we came up with a Web Application to connect gym goers. We aspired to create a space where gym goers are comfortable enough to find gym-partners that will help them reach their fitness goals.

Method

In the first step we determined features for our project by using project management tools like Miro and Linear. After we collected all our ideas, we ranked the given features regarding their importance for our developing process. By doing so we had a given set of functionalities which we then split upon our team members equally. To implement these functionalities, we worked with languages as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, used the JavaScript library React. JSON was also used to create our database. The IDEE of choice was Visual Studio Code.

To hold ourselves accountable we held daily team meetings to exchange our progress which were topped off with a weekly meeting in which reflected progress of the last week and determined goals for further progression.

Result

The final version of our web application is constructed out of a landing page, a login/sign in page, the main page — containing the Matching System and a page where the user can view his profile details. The star of our application is the Matching System.

When the Login is done, our users are directed to the matching page. Here the profiles of many other gym enthusiasts, who are looking forward to meeting their ideal gym buddy, are presented to the user. After taking a look at the name, a picture and a short introduction sentence of the suggested user, one has to decide now whether the displayed user woulIron Mate — A Web Application To Find The Perfect Gym Buddy

We achieved to create an application which is simple and easy to work with, but still very effective for the user, who will be able to find the perfect fitting training partner, stay motivated and most importantly stay active and healthy.

GitHub repository: https://github.com/TL-Joshua/ironmate_fe

The Team:

Kamil Chahrour: Web Developement Track - Front-End/Back-End

Philippus Asefaw: Web Developement Track - Front-End/Back-End

Melissa Sentürk: Web Developement Track - Front-End

Joshua Nguyen

Pejman Poh: Mentor