BROJ Launches Industry's First AI-Driven Fitness Center Management Access System On AWS

BROJ Co., Ltd. (BROJ) is a startup that develops and provides integrated fitness management solutions. These include fitness center management, member information, member access management, and reservation management services.

BROJ’s main services include “BROJ Sign” for electronic contract management, BROJ CRM” for fitness membership management, “BROJ Calendar” for class reservation management, “BROJ No Touch” that enables entry and attendance checks through facial recognition – a first in the industry, “BROJ Pass/GATE” to control doors with face recognition, and “BROJ POS” for unmanned payment management. Currently, BROJ is focusing on integrating automation systems to reduce labor costs in fitness centers.

BROJ CEO, and developer, Kwang Jeong, initially hired 80 percent of its employees as developers, investing heavily in service development and innovation. Jeong said, “We wanted to develop and maintain all the services by ourselves. We realized that to remain competitive, we needed to develop services faster and with a small number of personnel to handle fewer operational tasks, so we could scale up as the business grows.”

BROJ needed a cloud solution with a proven track record, and widely used by other companies. It also wanted services with multiple artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies that could respond to fast-changing market trends.

BROJ chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its wide range of services, customer references, and its large developer community. Initially, its AWS server was configured to scale up at any time by utilizing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Amazon CloudFront.

Sang-il Nam, head of BROJ's development team, said, “COVID began to spread when we were providing smart attendance management services. That’s when we began thinking about services that would allow attendance and entry in a safer way, instead of touching a screen. We decided to develop in-house, a service using face recognition technology. We wanted to use Amazon Rekognition, which provides real-time face detection and comparison, to launch the 'BROJ No Touch' service to help fitness centers.” 

In May 2020, BROJ launched the “BROJ No Touch” service for access control and attendance-taking through facial recognition, an industry first. It successfully launched its facial recognition service using Amazon Rekognition. BROJ No Touch snaps a photo of a user's face at a kiosk, and then uploads the photo to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The solution searches and compares the uploaded image with stored images, matches the results, and processes class attendance records.”

In addition, having non-face-to-face operations allow fitness centers with staffing flexibility, helping to achieve cost savings. It also helps fitness centers become more competitive by running a system to manage access using facial recognition across multiple locations.

Jeong said, “Being able to launch a service to meet rapidly changing market trends was possible because AWS provided the technology that we needed. For startups, speed is essential to keep up with the competition, and AWS was a springboard to achieve this kind of speed.”

Nam added, “there were no major problems with implementing AWS technology because it has well-organized technical documentation, and we can test the service directly through demos. By adopting AWS, we were able to manage our infrastructure flexibly, letting our developers focus on their core work.”

BROJ plans to improve the user experience in the short term, and to maximize the business efficiency of fitness centers by phasing in more automation solutions in the future.

The company continues to grow by developing on new services using AWS technology, services, and solutions. By utilizing various AWS services, BROJ aims to provide not only integrated fitness management solutions, but also services that enhances everyone’s well-being. 

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