Teen engineering wiz heading to international competition

A YouTube sensation at 16 and successful entrepreneur at 17, FIU student Adrian Mederos could have decided to take a short break. Instead, at age 19, he has found his Next Big Thing.

The electrical engineering senior earlier this month spent two days working with strangers on a project that earned a first-place finish in competition and made them contenders for a prize in Poland.

The avowed tinkerer—“I like to build,” he says, “That’s basically what it all boils down to”—enjoyed his latest triumph at Startup Weekend. The 54-hour event brings together techies, designers, marketers and others to share ideas and develop prototypes and plans for potential companies. Miami was one of six locations in which several groups battled to turn out the best in “wearable and fashion tech.”

Adrian Mederos

Mederos came to the contest with a unique clothing business already under his belt. The endeavor was born in 2011 when he posted a video showing off a jumpsuit he had wired with lights. More than half a million viewers came looking, and a number of them left a similar question in the comments section: How can I get one? Mederos saw an opportunity, and soon he was outfitting DJs and dance troupes to the tune of thousands of dollars.

To get the operation running, Mederos quickly taught himself to program a web site, filed documents to incorporate his business, LuminatedWear, revved up his marketing machine and began paying quarterly federal and state sales taxes. In between all that, he handmade everything he was selling.

“I always admired the people who could say, ‘I started my company when I was 16,’ so I said, ‘Hell, I want to do the same,’” Mederos explains. “I just always wanted to get a head start.” He has since launched a second venture, an e-commerce company that sells his and other people’s DIY kits.

The son of a high school science teacher and a mom who works at a salon, the self-starter says that when it came to establishing his businesses, he learned more from YouTube and other web sources than from live people—and he likes it that way.

“The Internet is my mentor,” he says in all earnestness. “Google is the best mentor, and the library. I can’t believe the state of technology that we’re in. Information is just everywhere.”

The reality of the brilliant loner meant that Startup Weekend, where Mederos found himself on a seven-person team, would introduce him to the concept of collaborating with other humans. “I’ve always been a one-man show,” he says, “so taking into account other people’s personalities and working as a team is strange to me.”

At the Startup Weekend icebreaker, he gravitated to the idea of a participant who wanted to improve her exercise form. She felt the trainer at her CrossFit gym was often busy with others and couldn’t give her enough attention. Her solution: create some kind of clothing that would tell her if she is doing an exercise properly.

“That’s where I plugged in my two cents,” Mederos recalls, his inner-engineer coming into focus as he talks about getting started. “Basically, I took a Wii, I broke it, I hacked it, plugged it into a microcontroller, and that I connected to a laptop. I streamed the serial data from the accelerometer to the laptop.”

An early prototype, worn by one of Mederos’ fellow team members, shows the sensors that detect the wearer’s movements as he or she exercises. Workout data would be viewable via an app on the user’s cellphone.

With additional tinkering and the work of another tech-savvy team member, the product morphed into a lightweight garment that is embedded with sensors and worn over workout clothes. The sensors pick up the user’s movements and record the data in an app installed on his or her phone. That data is then compared against best-practice data to identify where the user might have fallen short, such as not fully extending on a repetition or curving the spine instead of keeping it straight. The user can choose to receive real-time notification of an improperly executed exercise via sound or a vibration, or he or she can choose to simply view the data later.

“No one’s ever done something that has a network of data,” Mederos says. “It’s all been a wrist or a band or a heart responder. But no one’s ever made it a full thing where you can actually look at all your posture data.” The technology will be tailored initially for a CrossFit workout and eventually be customized for different sports. The target market includes trainers and sports teams as well as individuals.

The originator of the idea led the presentation to a panel of investors and entrepreneurs, during which Mederos happily took a much smaller role. “I was nervous,” he recalls, “and all I had to do was open my laptop and show it to the judges.”

With refinements to their earlier work, the group hopes to take the project to the top when they share it at the international competition in October. Whatever happens, Mederos feels he has already won.

“My biggest takeaway is the business sense. Going to this,” he says of the competition, “I was really exposed to ‘This is how people do it in the real world.’ Everything just fit together when we had all the team members, and we had all the skills that we needed.”

Mederos adds that he would consider making the wearable device the basis for a new company even without an investor. In the mean time, the experience has him excited about his future senior design project. Much like Startup Weekend, FIU’s engineering program requires that he partner with others—in this case, fellow students—to create problem-solving technology.

“I have some ideas for what I can do,” he says, “so I’d love to bring it to the people who really can build things and see how far we can go.”