You’re headed to the Wooden Center for a workout, hoping the place isn’t packed like last time with lines of people waiting to use treadmills. If only you could find out in advance how busy the gym might be.
Now you can, with a mobile phone app from UCLA Recreation called GymFlow. The free iPhone app gives you a count of user traffic every 15 minutes at the Wooden Center, along with specific counts for the cardio room, weight room and other areas. Data — from BruinCard swipes at entryway turnstiles and head counts taken hourly by staff — are sent via mobile phone to a database that posts the numbers to GymFlow.User data for Kinross Recreation Center (KREC) and the five campus pools can also be found on GymFlow. For each facility, a bar graph shows whether it’s currently slow, moderate or busy. The app also includes each facility’s hours along with a schedule of GroupX classes, from ballet bootcamp at the Wooden Center to water aerobics in the Student Activities Center pool.
GymFlow is the result of a collaboration between the Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC), UCLA Recreation and UCLA Student Affairs. Two years ago, USAC surveyed undergraduate students to ascertain interest in having a tool to help them figure out the best and worst times to use the Wooden Center. Ninety percent of those who responded expressed interest, which is not surprising given that all of UCLA’s 42,000 undergrad and graduate students get free use of UCLA Recreation facilities, and another 7,300 faculty, staff and others are also members.
An earlier plan to mount live-cams at recreation facilities for posting to the UCLA Recreation website was nixed as being invasive to patrons’ privacy.
GymFlow, which was created by some recent USC graduates to track user traffic at one campus gym, launched earlier this year but has been enhanced with the help of a UCLA student. Katherine McDonald, a fourth-year applied mathematics major and UCLA Recreation student staff member, worked with the developers to incorporate additional data for UCLA’s facilities. McDonald is also responsible for the slow-moderate-busy scale, which she calculated by analyzing two year’s worth of user traffic data collected at the Wooden Center. GymFlow uses this same historic data to forecast traffic through the end of each day.
Last week’s announcement about GymFlow prompted 600 downloads in one day. That number has more than doubled and continues to rise, staffers said, and an Android version of the app will soon be in the works.
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Learn more and get a link to download GymFlow here.
