Fitness Tracker Missing Your Steps? Build a Robot to Step for You!

Fitness trackers like Fitbit are a perfect fit for fitness enthusiasts, but they’re not perfect. The pedometer in particular, which counts your steps, relies on the movement of your arm as you walk or run. That means that steps will often be missed if you’re walking without moving your arm much, like if you’re pushing a baby stroller. If that’s the case, don’t worry! Southern Fried Science has an open source robot design you can build to reenact those missed steps.

Yes, reStepper is meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are real-world applications. In some cases, health insurance costs are tied to your steps, and some universities even penalize students who don’t take enough steps. This solution is a simple robot design with a single servo that swings an arm back and forth. That arm has both an elbow joint and a wrist joint, so it accurately replicates the movement of the fitness tracker as if you were walking. That’s enough to fool the fitness tracker into counting steps, and you can make up those lost walks.

An Arduino is used to control the servo and a small LCD is used for displaying the step settings. The entire frame of the robot is made from acrylic laser-cut on a Glowforge. While the operation is straightforward, it does have one really neat feature: you can input the number of calories your burned during an activity, and reStepper will translate that into the number of steps it needs to take. If you ran a mile, for instance, it’s easy enough to estimate how many calories you burned. Just input those calories, and reStepper will take the corresponding number of steps!