
I built an app to help improve my handstand - alibad
I wanted to motivate myself to do more handstands, so I built an app to take me a few steps further.<p>I personally find tracking my progress to be very effective, especially if I am serious enough about my goal. It helps me know that I am on track and look into ways to course correct if I am not. The app lets me track my handstands and do other complementary exercises with my voice (start, stop, next), so I don’t have to waste time and energy logging my progress.<p>If you’ve managed big projects before, you know there are two types of metrics: input and output metrics. How long I can hold a handstand is an example output metric. An input metric is for example how much I am practicing my handstands daily. One of the secrets for doing a handstand is practicing consistently, so I&#x27;ve built into the app daily minutes goal to encourage daily practice, even for just 5 minutes, with reminders and log&#x2F;calendar and daily&#x2F;weekly&#x2F;monthly stats.<p>The app also helps me track other exercises, especially warm up exercises, that can help me practice handstand safely and show up every day, even if just to meditate about handstands when I’m injured.<p>All that sounds great, but to be honest, I have not yet managed to improve my handstands. I’ve been too busy building the app, and now have it published on the iOS app store.<p>So now I have no more excuses! My plan is to go from inconsistently holding a handstand for 3 seconds to consistently holding a handstand for 15 seconds by the end of the year. I will post updates on my blog here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.handstandquest.com&#x2F;blog. Feel free to follow me and hold me accountable or join me to hit your own goal by the end of the year!
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gus_massa
Clicky:
[https://www.handstandquest.com/blog](https://www.handstandquest.com/blog)

Perhaps a post with more technical details can get more traction. How do you
detect the word "stop"? Does it detect any loud noise, or it is specific to
the word? Is is configurable for other languages? (How do you mark when you
begin? Does it recognizes the word "start"?)

The set of exercises look adapted to handstand. Are you planing to release an
extension for other types of exercises?

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alibad
Yes, I will looking into adding more exercises, and potentially expanding to
other focus areas (ex: push ups)

Right now, I leverage the Apple SDK for voice recognition, and then match
words based on length: match by 1 word, 2 words, etc..

It works really well, but I plan to optimize a bit more by building a model
for very specific words so it faster , more reliable, less device-dependent,
and lot lighter, leveraging pocket sphinx.

