FITIZENS: Revolutionizing Fitness Through AI and Data

From boxing to Les Mills classes, and even home workouts, Victor Gonzalez and Daniel Sierra Ramos, professors at IE School of Science and Technology struggled to exercise amid their busy lives. “We eventually abandoned all our efforts,” Sierra Ramos said.

Following the pandemic, both recognized fitness’ profound impact on health, and left their corporate jobs creating AI products to set up their own company, Fitizens, using a ground-breaking sports technology that helps people commit to their training.

Fitizens is the latest example of Sci-Tech professors breaking boundaries between academia and industry at IE’s entrepreneurially-driven, rigorous polytechnic. The pair not only bring their tech expertise to their business startup but incorporate students in the real-world experience.

“We want to help people get a healthier lifestyle by making them more active. For that we have created a technology that helps people in two different ways when they are doing exercise,” Gonzalez said. “First, we help them get into the habit of training, and second, we help them maximize their progress once they’ve got that habit.”

To push users into training regularly, the two founders designed gamification strategies within Fitizens, enabling users to gauge their performance relative to others through real-time competitions during classes. However, quitting often stems from frustration, according to Gonzalez and Sierra Ramos – individuals fail to achieve their fitness goals because they monitor their progress inaccurately, resulting in either undertraining or overtraining.

“We address both situations [overtraining and undertraining] with our reports after training. Our AI system produces data from the athlete’s performance for every exercise. So we are able to quantify how close and how far they got from their objectives,” Sierra Ramos said. “All of these features help the athlete and her trainer to understand what they need to adapt to maximize their progress, hence boosting her motivation to keep training.”

Fitizens’ technology works through a programmable inertial measurement unit attached to a chest band, collecting various metrics such as cadence and fatigue during exercise. This information is then analyzed by a special AI and accessible through two different mobile apps – Fitizens Athlete and Fitizens Arena, all interconnected through a cloud infrastructure.

An alumni from the Executive MBA, Gonzalez started teaching several courses in both the IE Sci-Tech and IE Business School such as the Bachelor of Data and Business Analytics. Ramos, on the other hand, specializes in teaching two Python courses for the Master in Business Analytics & Big Data (MBD).

Thirty percent of IE University alumni have begun a startup at some point in their career. In its 2022 Global MBA ranking, the Financial Times ranked IE Business School fourth in the world, and first in Europe for entrepreneurship teaching.

The Fitizens founders said that IE University’s unique environment inspires them in their own startup and allows them to incorporate students into the venture through internships and capstone projects, giving them a real-world tech venture experience.

A “symbiosis” as they call it, the two professors believe collaborating with their students at IE Sci-Tech also enables the startup to explore new research areas while simultaneously engaging students in the development of a ground-breaking technology.

Viviana Florez, MBD student and intern at Fitizens began developing an auto-labeling tool that automatically incorporates new exercises into the AI catalog, potentially reducing the operational cost of doing it manually by more than 300%.

“Being part of Fitizens represented a unique experience that, without a doubt, significantly enriched my personal and professional growth,” Florez said. “In the field of data science, I managed to expand my knowledge by carrying out a complete ETL [Extract, Transform, and Load]. In addition, I strengthened my understanding in building machine learning models, covering both traditional techniques and those linked to deep learning.”

José Manuel Cuenca Lerma, another intern and MBD student, has built a mobile application that calculates pre-training fatigue of athletes from just three consecutive jumps using Fitizens’s sensors, a scientifically proven technique to estimate athletes’ fatigue levels used in elite sports teams.

Gonzalez and Sierra Ramos have four interns overall, and are collaborating with two other groups of Sci-Tech students that are completing their graduation capstone projects.

An entrepreneurial-driven, rigorous polytechnic, IE School of Science and Technology designs its programs to expand the impact of individuals through the power of collaboration, aiming to accelerate the breakthroughs of STEM education.

“IE School of Science and Technology is playing a very big role in this. The most important one, it allowed us to work with incredibly talented people. We have had four internships since we started working with IE and we could not be happier with it,” Gonzalez said.