Strive Tech (Wearable Muscle Activation Technology)

Let’s start off with an overview. What is Strive Tech?

The Strive Tech experience is a wearable tech that measures the user’s muscle activity and offers data, analysis, and insights to aid in achieving peak performance. The wearable is a pair of sensor-lined compression shorts with a Bluetooth enabled Pod that connects to the user’s iOS device. The shorts capture muscle activity from the athlete’s Quads (quadriceps), Hams (hamstrings), and Glutes (gluteus maximus), and offer summary and detailed views of muscle exertion, muscle distribution (exertion across 3 muscle groups), and muscle symmetry (left leg VS right leg exertion across 3 muscle groups). The accelerometer in the Pod also displays movement intensity which gives the user additional context to understand the workout journey and make meaning of the muscle data (what was I doing at this point in the workout?).

Strive Tech offers it’s technology to collegiate and professional athletes through the Teams App experience, and additionally to consumers through the Consumer App experience.
On the Teams App (collegiate and professional use cases), the Strength and Conditioning Coach is the Strive user and the Athletes wear the sensor-lined Shorts and Pod. In this many-to-one use case, the strength and conditioning coach’s onboarding is such that they create their profile, then build their Roster by adding athletes to their “Org.” The strength and conditioning coach then facilitates workouts with their Roster by adding relevant athletes to a “session.”
The consumer app experience however centers on a more familiar framework. The user creates their profile, adds their hardware to their profile and facilitates their own sessions and interacts with their own data.

Strive Tech (Pod) Industrial Design

Pod Ideation

As an industrial designer, the strive hardware represented a unique opportunity. The product would be worn on the body of elite, world-class athletes during training and competition. Athletes’ main priority when interfacing with sensor products for training purposes is to have the product as invisible as possible. - Once they put the product on, they want to go about performing their training regiment and competition with no consideration whatsoever to the piece of hardware that they’re wearing.

The main objective for the athlete wearing this product is for it to not exist. Once they put in on, they need to be able to forget that its even there

Prior to joining Strive Tech, I consulted with the team to help develop their Pod (sensor hardware). When I joined full-time, our objective was to develop the 4th iteration of our hardware. My excitement was high from day one, as we had made some intentional trade-offs to further decrease the overall volume of our hardware. When I first handled the 3D printed prelim volume model, I was astounded by how small our next gen pod had the potential to be. Even being familiar with the dimension of the product at that stage, it was astounding to handle it next to our previous generation of products. I even double checked the dimensions to confirm that this volume achievement wasn’t a result of an incorrectly translated file. Upon further inspection and opening the volume model to reveal the battery and PCA, I realized that in-fact, this model was a representation of our overall size. - How exciting!

The objective when designing the Pod Charger was to design a small and handsome unit that could be used as an individual charger, but also be used in a matrix to serve as a scalable component in our 5-unit and 10 unit charging solutions (for professional and collegiate teams).

Premium Package Ideation

Inspired by premium athletic shoe unboxing experiences, with a goal of 100% recyclable materials I developed the Strive Package to house a complete kit (2 pairs of shorts, 1 Pod, and 1 Charger), with placement of every item neatly considered.

I sourced package suppliers and submitted preliminary design drawings for the RFQ process. I managed all communications with the packaging supplier to develop a complete package design for both our premium package as well as our bulk shipping solution.

During a meeting with the supplier I came to realize that our quantities would rule out the economic feasibility of a pulp tray. After accepting this I started to think through alternatives and quickly realized that we could use the geometry of the Pod’s rail system to “lock” the pod in place on a panel of E-Flute inside the package.