Athletech Pod

So what exactly is Athletech Pod? It is a smart, light based reaction training device built specifically for rehabilitation and physical medicine. We took inspiration from traditional systems and built our own version completely from scratch, covering everything from the hardware to the companion app. The goal was simple: bring this kind of interactive exercise technology into clinics and therapy settings at a price that actually works.

Each pod runs on an ESP32-C3 microcontroller with custom firmware. Therapists and patients use a our Flutter app to control sessions, track progress, and look back at their full history. The hardware is built to handle a full clinic day, giving up to 8 hours of continuous use on a single charge.

Why did we decide to build it? The tools that already exist are good, but they are expensive. Devices like Blaze Pod are well designed and effective, but the price puts them out of reach for a lot of clinics, especially smaller practices and rehabilitation centers working with tight budgets.

We wanted to fix that. We wanted to build something that matched the experience of those high end systems in terms of usability and data quality, while keeping costs low enough that more clinics and patients could actually use it. Rehab technology should not be a luxury. Athletech Pod is our take on what an affordable, full featured rehab device should look like.

How does it work? The pods light up in patterns or sequences and the patient taps them as quickly and accurately as they can. Every response is recorded in real time and sent back to the app.

The hardware is built around the ESP32-C3, a compact microcontroller that handles wireless communication, LED control, and tap detection all at once. The circuit, the enclosure, and the firmware were all designed and built by us.

The app is built with Flutter so it runs on any platform. Therapists use it to set up exercises, watch live sessions, and check patient history. We kept the interface straightforward so anyone can pick it up and start using it right away.

The exercise system is one of the parts we are most proud of. The app comes with a library of ready to use exercises covering common rehab goals at different difficulty levels. Therapists can also build their own exercises from scratch, choosing how many pods to use, the timing, the sequence, and the difficulty level. After setting up exercises, they can be organized into playlists. A playlist runs each exercise one after another automatically, so a full session can move from warmup to reaction training to cool down without anyone touching the app in between.

Every session produces detailed data: reaction time per tap, accuracy, total touches, and session duration. Over time this becomes a complete activity history for each patient. The app turns that into progress graphs and a recovery score so it is easy to see if a patient is getting better, staying flat, or needs their program changed. Therapists can look at reaction time trends over weeks, compare sessions side by side, and use the data to make real decisions about a patient's recovery.

Athletech Pod is a proprietary product. It is not open source and there are no plans to change that.

Images and video coming soon: hardware photos, app screenshots, and a demo of a live session.

#rehab #physicaltherapy #ESP32 #Flutter #reactiontraining