Proteus Motion Slashes Product Costs and Assembly Times

Sam Miller, CEO, founded Proteus Motion in 2015 to create an intelligent, connected fitness and rehab tool to optimize movement through an innovative approach to resistance and strength training instead of traditional methods focused on muscle isolation. The Proteus® System is like a sports science lab in a box: It produces in five minutes what 20 pieces of equipment and three hours in a traditional lab can output.

Miller was an all-around athlete growing up. He was also a frequent rehab patient, often frustrated by inefficient equipment and his lack of access to objective performance data as he spent long, inefficient hours rehabbing his legs and feet. “Straight line exercises [of typical fitness equipment]—they just don't translate to real human movements. Everything we do is in three dimensions,” explains Director of Proteus Motion Hardware Engineering Paul Vizzio.
 

Miller knew his concept and product would fill needs in the fitness arena. However, designing and executing the Proteus System for assembly and manufacturing at a reasonable cost presented enormous challenges. The small startup started using open-source CAD programs to develop proof of concepts but quickly determined it needed professional CAD software.

Saving Time and Money

Proteus Motion especially suffered from chaotic file naming and storage and a lack of file access, which slowed productivity. Vizzio recalls, “It could get pretty daunting [just finding and] opening a file.” But after adopting 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS®, he notes, “On the platform, everything's there at your fingertips, and it's super convenient—I can do it on my phone, I can do it on my tablet, I can do it anywhere I want. I love the 3DEXPERIENCE platform because it has made my life easier.”

Leveraging 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS enabled Proteus Motion to significantly increase efficiency and reduce R&D costs, especially during its revision cycles. “Since adopting the platform, we reduced the BOM costs by a factor of four, so four times cheaper than it used to be,” reports Vizzio. “And then from an actual assembly standpoint, it used to take two weeks to put one [Proteus System] together, and now it takes three hours to put one together.”

Vizzio continues, “For commercial fitness, you need to have a six-times safety factor for all load-bearing components, which is a tremendous safety factor compared to other industries. For us to do that, we really need finite element analysis (FEA). Having the FEA built in, we iterated hundreds, if not thousands of times on the frame, on the shafts, on the pulleys, on the belts—every single component was touched by the FEA provided through 3DEXPERIENCE Works Simulation.”

Proteus Motion achieved a commercial fitness first by producing both hardware and software that accurately measures and helps strengthen, optimize, and restore sports movements and human power using patented 3D resistance and 3D measurement. The company possesses numerous patents (issued and pending), along with over 10 million unique data points collected from users.

One Platform for All the Work

“The revision management, product life cycle management being included, is probably the biggest thing for us. And it's just kind of integrated within 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS. And then simulation and also rendering and all of it being in that one platform is great for us.”
 

Vizzio concludes, “We're trying to create the gold standard in measuring, recording, and tracking human power, and the only way we're going to get there is by making reliable, repeatable, durable hardware—from there, we can create the software on top of that to output the results, track them, measure them, and make them useful for not only athletes, but all humans moving forward.”