Martial Arts Training Application & Body Armour

A smart phone application and martial arts body armour equipment are designed, programmed, assembled, and tested based on cost, sustainability, durability, and manufacturability for the purpose of enhancing martial artist’s training routines within the boundaries of the Android platform, closed source software, and client requirements.

The project was directed by the client, a Karate instructor, looking for better training solutions. The objective of the project was to deliver a working prototype of a mobile application that can communicate with a body armour to record strike data. The mobile application would aggregate strike power, location, and timing data gathered from each sensor and display it to the end user to provide a visual representation of progress and areas requiring improvement. The mobile application, in conjunction with the body armour, would enable martial artists to assign concrete data to their striking, both the power of the strikes and the locations of the strikes, allowing more informed and precise training. The visualisation of the data and gamifying certain elements would provide incentive to continuously train and hone their skills.

To achieve this goal, our team disassembled and embedded sensors connected to a microcontroller within the body armour provided by the client, this involved various electrical engineering work. The electrical circuits for the sensors went through different variations and required extensive testing to achieve the desired accuracy, granularity, and range for the sensor readings. A printed circuit board (PCB) was designed, printed, and assembled for the final circuit. Wires were routed throughout the armour and soldered to the PCB with the microcontroller. The microcontroller read and transmitted data to our mobile application.

The mobile application was built for Android using Kotlin, the official language for Android development. Communication was done through Bluetooth; the functionality was built from the microcontrollers side and the applications side. When entering one of the modes, the application read the transmitted data from the armour and display the appropriate data depending on the mode. Three modes were built, training mode with a configurable time that displayed strike strength, location, and averages to the user. The second mode was a speed game mode, giving the user one minute to strike the armour as much as possible, with their total strikes displayed and being their final score. The last mode was a strength game mode, giving the user ten seconds to strike the armour as hard as they could, displaying their greatest strike. Strike data was saved and persisted to allow the user to review their progress. The application allowed for multiple users, with the strike data tied to the appropriate user. Saving the users and strike data was done using SQLite, Androids bundled database.

There were various challenges along the way, but the project has been a success with a working prototype built. The project provided various exercises and concepts in both computer engineering and electrical engineering disciplines. Producing the prototype was a valuable experience which allowed for experimentation, creative thinking, learning opportunities, and team building.