A STYKU PROMOTION
Measure of success
Physicist turned tech entrepreneur, Raj Sareen, explains how his 3D body scanner Styku will revolutionise member acquisitions, retention and revenues for your health club
What’s your background?
Raj Sareen
I was a physicist who also worked at NASA and spent a few of my post-grad years researching extra-solar planets – basically hunting planets around other stars. But as much as I love science, I felt an urge to build something more tangible. My mother and father are both successful entrepreneurs, having created a very successful CAD software for clothing design that’s used worldwide today. I joined them to learn more about software development and running a business.
Was that where Styku was born?
What was your next step?
While there, I started a personal innovation lab. The first idea I had was to hack together an inexpensive body scanner. While there were a few products on the apparel market, they were very expensive and clunky. I could see the potential for offering body measurements in a non-invasive way, and so started to research how we could make this a good experience for people, make the data accurate and offer a product at an affordable cost.
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Effectively yes. They taught us how to fail fast and we soon realised the apparel market was not ready for this type of product – at least not yet. But once we turned our attention to the health and fitness market – creating an algorithm for measuring body composition and body fat percentage using circumference measurements – everything just fell into place. We knew we had a value proposition for health clubs.
Can you describe the product?
Styku consists of a computer, turntable and a vertical unit that houses a 3D scanner. The whole kit only weighs around 17kg and is portable – making it ideal for PTs and for use at one-off fitness events as
How did you develop Styku?
My first attempt involved 21 off-the-shelf webcams. I wrote the software myself and at 0.87 seconds, it was effectively the world’s fastest scanner. But it was also a behemoth and not something I wanted to commercialise. Shortly after, Microsoft launched the world’s first affordable commercial 3D sensor – the Kinect. We hacked into the Kinect camera and turned it into a scanning device. Microsoft took notice. Initially, they warned we were breaking their licensing agreements. I have to admit, we carried on regardless, and a few months later they contacted us again
to say that actually, they loved what we were doing and wanted to work with us! That led to us being chosen as one of 11 companies, from 500 applicants, to spend three months at Microsoft’s incubator for Techstars in Seattle.
Styku's computer, turntable and scanner pack up into a portable kit weighing just 17kg
healthclubmanagement.co.uk November/December 2016 ©Cybertrek 2016