The outcome you are walking toward
A complete hardware specification for one Helix club: the edge node that runs the floor, the Vision Intelligence kit class that makes form and pose visible, the access and check-in layer, the locker and display surface, and the kit tier that fits your format — specified tightly enough to take into a site survey and a procurement conversation.
One honesty note up front. Everything here is a reference configuration, finalized per site survey — power, network, sightlines, equipment layout, and privacy zones are confirmed on site before a bill of materials is locked. Where a capability is staged rather than generally shipped, the wording says "designed to."
Six design principles
The playbook every Helix location is specified against:
- Form and effort must be visible in real time — cameras, equipment telemetry, and the member app fuse into one picture.
- The floor is a living Mesh — every machine, station, and zone is discoverable and health-checked.
- The member journey is continuous — check-in, training, recovery, and lifestyle signals stay connected.
- Offline resilience is mandatory — an always-open club cannot stop core access, logging, or safety loops during an outage.
- Privacy and consent are first-class — visual and biometric data operate under strict policy packs.
- Standardized kits over custom builds — every club is designed to feel like a coherent variation of the same organism.
Layer 1: The core edge (mandatory)
Every Helix location starts with the same foundation:
- Primary Edge Node — industrial, fanless, with a hardware trust anchor and dual connectivity.
- Hot-standby edge — optional, recommended for larger clubs.
- Managed PoE switch — powers and connects the camera and device fabric.
- UPS — sized for critical access, the edge, and key cameras.
- The local runtime stack — local Mesh, local Synapse, the local policy engine, and the critical agent runtime. Helix Coach runs at the edge: a reduced "Helix Coach light" runtime keeps form feedback and safety loops on the floor even when the uplink is down. The L0–L4 layer model covers where this stack sits in the platform.
Layer 2: Access, identity & check-in
- Smart access control across doors, turnstiles, and member-app unlock
- Check-in terminals or tablet kiosks
- Optional mobile credential readers
- Locker system integration where lockers are present
- Staff zones — back office, storage, laundry — on separate access policy
Access decisions are made locally against cached credentials and the signed policy snapshot; they are part of the offline contract covered below.
Layer 3: Vision & form intelligence
The Vision Intelligence kit class covers the zones where form actually happens:
- Free-weight floor
- Squat, deadlift, and Olympic platforms
- Functional training zones
- Key machine banks
- Stretching and mobility areas
- Entrance and high-traffic zones
Pose, form, and activity inference run on the edge, alongside occupancy and zone-utilization sensing. Visual data operates under strict policy packs, with privacy zones and real-time redaction — covered in the privacy section below.
Layer 4: Equipment & telematics
Connected equipment joins the floor through native or gateway integration — the Axon equipment layer normalizes heterogeneous machines into one schema. Where native telemetry is weak, utilization and load sensors fill the gap; station presence detection and predictive-maintenance signals report into Mesh. This layer is deliberately specified as capabilities and integration paths, not brand lists: the survey maps them onto the equipment you actually own.
Layer 5: Training floor devices
- Rugged tablets or wall-mounted stations for guided workouts
- Optional member-facing form-feedback displays
- Heart-rate and wearable gateways
- Digital class boards and scheduling displays
Layer 6: Supporting systems
- Environmental sensors — temperature, humidity, CO2, air quality
- Audio and announcement integration where useful
- Inventory sensing for retail or supplement areas where present
Privacy zones and policy-controlled retention
Visual and biometric data operate under strict policy packs, and the packs are part of the installation, not an afterthought:
- Privacy zones are drawn during the site survey — areas cameras never cover, and areas covered with real-time redaction.
- Retention is policy-controlled — the edge evidence and digest store keeps policy decisions, agent actions, and critical event digests under retention rules set by the policy pack, not by operator habit.
- Isolation is per brand — member data from your clubs stays inside your brand boundary, enforced the same way as every other data class on the platform (per-brand data isolation).
The audit trail & evidence model covers how evidence is captured at the moment of action; governed agent boundaries covers what the agents running on this hardware are and are not allowed to do.
Kit tiers
Five standardized kits cover the formats the playbook is designed for:
- Helix Core Kit — edge, access control, essential floor cameras, and basic displays. Smaller studios and boutique formats.
- Helix Full Club Kit — Core plus the rich vision array, equipment gateways, floor tablets, and environmental sensing. Standard full-size clubs.
- Helix Performance Kit — Full Club plus advanced pose systems, higher-density equipment telemetry, and recovery sensors. Performance and hybrid facilities.
- Helix 24/7 Unmanned Kit — Full Club plus strengthened access, higher edge resilience, and a remote-monitoring focus. Unmanned or lightly staffed locations.
- Helix Multi-Studio Network Kit — the standardized stack optimized for rapid multi-site rollout. Franchise and multi-brand networks.
All kits are Mesh-native and designed for immediate Helix Coach and supporting-agent activation. The MCV.STORE kits page is where kit classes are browsed; the per-site bill of materials is finalized per site survey.
The offline posture for always-open clubs
The vertical commitment, stated plainly: 24/7 access + form feedback must survive prolonged outages. When connectivity is lost, the location is designed to keep its critical loops:
- Access control continues to function on local credentials and cached policy
- The edge continues form inference and local feedback where possible
- Workout logging is stored locally with full integrity
- Critical safety alerts still fire locally and are queued
- On reconnect: ordered replay, deduplication, and full reconciliation
- No access authority is lost
- No member session data is dropped
The full contract this posture inherits — what must continue, what may degrade, what is forbidden while disconnected, and how reconciliation works — is in Read the offline contract your locations run on.
Deployment sequence
- Site survey — power, network, sightlines, equipment layout, privacy zones
- Kit selection — and any performance options
- Physical installation — camera aiming and calibration
- Mesh join — policy and privacy pack download
- Equipment telematics onboarding — the Axon layer
- Access control and member identity binding
- Agent activation — Helix Coach plus the supporting agent team
- Pilot with trainers and select members
- Full production
- Continuous forging of programming and coaching playbooks
Where Helix Coach sits
Helix Coach lives inside these loops. It does not wait for the member to open the app the next day. Check-in loads journey context; a form deviation on a key lift fires a real-time cue and a trainer alert; a near-max effort attempt brings safety attention and logging; a fall-risk signal escalates immediately through the safety agent team. The agent authority model covers the authority envelopes these actions run inside.
What to take into your site survey
Bring this spec, your floor plan, and your equipment list. The survey confirms sightlines and privacy zones, sizes the UPS and the switch, fixes camera counts per zone, and selects the kit tier. From there, the fit vertical page shows the operating model this hardware drives, Run a pilot that earns expansion is the rollout shape we recommend for the first club, and the fit membership health loop shows what the instrumented floor feeds once it is live.