Swimming in the pool of entrepreneurship
Engineering grads developing wearable workout gear for real-time training feedback
Anna Liebenberg ( BASc ’22) and Shreshth Mehra ( BASc ’22) bonded over a mutual love of fitness.
Both, however, experienced moments of isolation in their athletic pursuits. For Mehra, it was when he was training for Iron Man, a long-distance triathlon event. For Liebenberg, it was when she was lifting weights at the gym without help from a personal trainer.
During his training, Mehra sought out Liebenberg’s expertise as a swim coach to help with his swimming skills, and the two started asking themselves an important question: could wearable technology provide feedback on optimal training form, much like a coach would?
“There’s a lot of tech being developed for triathlons, but nothing really for swimming ... to give you feedback on the quality of your movement,” Mehra says. “That's where it started from, and very soon, we realized that this technology is something which can be adapted to a lot of different things.”
Realizing the technology's potential, Mehra and Liebenberg founded TrainPro. They went on to win a Velocity $5K pitch competition and created a prototype in Velocity’s digital space on campus. Now that they have graduated, the two are working full-time on TrainPro at Velocity in downtown Kitchener.
Read full story on University of Waterloo News.
