Abstract

The global Covid-19 pandemic demanded many changes to the practices of professional fitness trainers who had previously been able to work face-to-face with their clients in fitness centers. To address their needs, the German business Strength Coaching Online began researching and developing their own custom web and mobile application in partnership with the Auckland International Campus of Otago Polytechnic. This article presents our background research and three case studies from the student projects undertaken in collaboration with Strength Coaching Online. Final-year Software Engineering students, their lecturers, with an experienced fitness coach, and an academic researcher have participated in each project. Together, they collaborated on the design and development of important aspects of the applications. During the third project, our ongoing AIRES Artificial Intelligence initiative emerged from the research of one of the student co-authors, driven by a dataset captured by the coach and their clients over many years. This third case study is presented in detail to show how in an Experiential Learning environment, students can develop complex systems such as AIRES. In this first phase of the research, AIRES explored the ethical use and management of medical-grade fitness data, the retrainability of Small Language AI models, and cost-effective computer hardware implementations that will be environmentally sustainable.

Keywords:
Capstone IT Projects, International Collaborations, Experiential Learning, Strength Training, Artificial Intelligence, Small Language Models.

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