GymPlus Keeps an Eye on Exercise Equipment with ASUS NUC

With the growth of minimally-staffed “cold gyms,” fitness center operators face a mounting challenge: they lack visibility into how equipment is used, making it difficult to manage their investments. Indoor Informatics, a pioneering AI solutions provider, created GymPlus to solve this problem by transforming existing security camera feeds into powerful analytics tools.

GymPlus leverages standard security cameras to monitor equipment usage, optimize gym layouts, track peak hours, and provide real-time information that helps gym owners make data-driven decisions. To bring this solution to market, Indoor Informatics needed a powerful yet compact computing hardware that could run sophisticated AI algorithms locally while requiring minimal maintenance.

After a careful search, the ASUS Next Unit of Computing (NUC) emerged as the best solution, offering the right balance of performance, reliability, and ease of deployment. By partnering with ASUS, Indoor Informatics was able to deliver an efficient yet effective solution.

“Reliability and streamlined development were our top two criteria. We want to keep our tech team small, so we needed a device we could trust and a development pipeline that made it easy to utilize the hardware.”

—Teemu Toivonen, CTO and Co-founder, Indoor Informatics.

Partnership Highlights

• ASUS NUC’s reliability and minimal maintenance requirements dramatically reduce support needs for an 8-person tech team
• Compact, power-efficient design avoids the overheating issues that plagued previous hardware solutions
• Seamless AI model deployment with tools like Intel Geti, accelerating development and optimization of gym monitoring AI
• Familiar PC platform allows customers to self-install the solution with minimal guidance
• Powerful processing handles complex AI workloads locally, assuring privacy while reducing cloud costs and complexity

The Challenge: Bringing AI to Cold Gyms

The fitness industry has been evolving toward cold gyms—facilities that operate with minimal staff presence for much of the day. While this model reduces operational costs, it creates challenges for equipment monitoring and facility management. Indoor Informatics identified several specific hurdles that needed to be overcome:

1. Developing an AI solution that could utilize existing security camera feeds to monitor fitness center equipment usage
2. Creating a system that was easy to install and required minimal maintenance, especially for unstaffed facilities
3. Enabling local AI processing to keep data private, lower cloud computing costs, and reduce network dependencies
4. Building a platform that would support ongoing development of new AI capabilities like optimizing gym operations and equipment portfolio management
5. Finding computing hardware powerful enough for AI processing yet compact and energy-efficient enough for gym environments

These challenges required finding the right hardware partner to provide reliable, powerful computing in a gym-friendly form factor.

The Solution: ASUS NUC Enables Local AI Processing

After testing various mini-PC options, Indoor Informatics selected the ASUS NUC as their hardware platform of choice. The NUC provided the perfect combination of processing power, reliability, and ease of use required to run GymPlus effectively in fitness center environments.

“We have tried mini-PCs from other vendors and find that ASUS NUCs outperforms all the competition for our use cases and provides the low maintenance we need.”

—Teemu Toivonen, CTO and Co-founder, Indoor Informatics

Key features of the ASUS NUC solution include:

• Familiar PC platform enabling easy setup and installation by customers themselves
• A compact, power-efficient design that avoids the overheating problems common in other mini-PC solutions
• Excellent price-to-performance ratio that balances power and cost efficiency
• Compatibility with world-class tools like Intel Geti for streamlined AI model development, training, and deployment.
• World-class support from ASUS for the rare occasions when assistance is needed

The ASUS NUC is typically installed at the front desk of the fitness facility. From there, it connects to the facility’s security camera system and processes video feeds locally using sophisticated AI algorithms to track equipment usage and member activity.

ASUS NUCs and GymPlus solution can be used to track equipment usage and member activity

The Results: Optimized Gyms with Minimal Overhead

The Indoor Informatics-ASUS partnership has delivered significant benefits to fitness center operators across multiple dimensions of their business.

For the first time, gym owners gain comprehensive visibility into equipment usage patterns. This data-driven approach allows operators to make informed decisions about equipment purchases, maintenance schedules, and layout changes. Underutilized machines can be repositioned or replaced, while popular equipment can be expanded to meet demand.

Gym layouts become a science rather than an art. By analyzing traffic flows and equipment utilization, GymPlus identifies bottlenecks and “dead zones.” These insights help owners reconfigure their facilities to create more efficient, inviting environments that can increase revenue by 10% via new member acquisition.

Traffic management has also been transformed. The system provides detailed information about facility usage throughout the day, enabling owners to adjust staffing levels, implement capacity management strategies, and even create incentives to redistribute traffic during overcrowded periods. As a result, gym owners can achieve a 30% reduction in overcrowding during peak hours, significantly improving the overall member experience and positively impacting member satisfaction and retention.

Best of all, Indoor Informatics can continuously enhance its AI offers thanks to tools like Intel Geti. With AI-ready processors, ASUS NUCs offer the scalability needed to support this rapid development pace and adapt to evolving project demands and emerging AI workloads. “We rolled out six models in just one month,” said Teemu Toivonen, the company’s CTO and Co-founder.

Despite all these advances, the technical overhead for gym operators remains remarkably low. The reliability and ease of use of the ASUS NUC platform means fitness centers don't need IT staff on premises. The system runs continuously with minimal maintenance, allowing gym operators to focus on their core business rather than managing technology.

“Installation is very straightforward: I can set up 50 systems a day and just ship them to customers. They can easily install them without much help”

—Teemu Toivonen, CTO and Co-founder, Indoor Informatics

The solution works particularly well for cold gyms that operate with minimal staff. Gym owners can now have 24/7 visibility into their facilities without requiring physical presence, and the system’s low maintenance requirements align perfectly with their lean operational models.

A Perfect Match for AI at the Edge

Indoor Informatics’ mission to optimize fitness center operations required the right balance of performance, reliability, and simplicity. The ASUS NUC delivered on all fronts, providing a powerful yet accessible platform for the company’s sophisticated AI technology. In the future, the company plans to expand into North American markets—and the ASUS NUC’s proven reliability gives Indoor Informatics the confidence they need to achieve their expansion goals.

With its compact size, ASUS NUCs can be easily placed on field, perfect for edge deployments.

This successful partnership demonstrates how edge computing can transform traditional businesses with minimal disruption. By analyzing existing camera feeds with local AI processing, Indoor Informatics helps gym owners understand and optimize their operations without requiring massive infrastructure investments or technical expertise.

As more industries seek to leverage AI for operational insights, the ASUS NUC’s combination of performance, reliability, and ease of deployment makes it an ideal platform for innovative solutions like GymPlus that bring the power of AI to the edge.

About Indoor Informatics

Indoor Informatics specializes in AI-powered monitoring solutions for fitness centers. For seven years, the company has been developing innovative technology that helps gym owners optimize their facilities and enhance the customer experience. Despite having a small team of just eight people, Indoor Informatics has built a loyal customer base across Finland and the Baltic states, with plans to expand globally.

The company’s GymPlus solution leverages existing security camera infrastructure to provide valuable insights into gym operations without requiring major hardware investments. By analyzing how members use equipment and facilities, GymPlus helps gym owners make data-driven decisions about layout, equipment purchases, and staffing levels.