Fitness Monitor

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

This is a program that might be used by a gym or by individuals using exercise equipment. Each day it records your body weight and performance, and will display graphs of your progress, e.g. upper body strength, leg strength, percent body fat etc. Graphs may be displayed as percent improvement.

The program is pre-configured with information about each exercise machine, such as the lowest and highest weight, the increment, the recommended pace, and perhaps hints on use such as the recommended pre-stretching exercises. You might include illustrations or photographs of the various machines.

The user selects which machines he wants to use. He can then enter the day’s workout using spinners to crank the weight up or down a notch from the previous workout. He can also enter the weight/reps he plans to use for the next workout.

It has pacing features. It pulses or beeps to show you the recommended speed for a particular exercise. It can pulse at the target rate you should feel your heart pumping during cardio exercise to give you an intuitive feel for it.

You could have standard templates for people starting off at various fitness levels.

You might use a mark sense document so that you just fill in (more) or (less) with a pencil.

The idea is to reinforce by graphically showing progress. There is no need to manually file/misfile cards.

Body Weight and Body Fat Tracking

Here is a scheme that would keep even an obsessive compulsive like Monk happy. It would also let you track weight readings and percent body fat readings. The computer program could do several things:

Graph daily weight and bodyfat readings over time.
Smooth the curves by also displaying a weekly moving average.
Adjust the readings to compensate for you personal daily cycle of weight/body fat reading fluctuation so you can see the true changes in the noise.
Allow you to track many readings a day by automatically timestamping each entry with the current date and time if you did not override them.

body fat
height
weight

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