Includefitness Ceo Ryan Eder Wins International Gold, Best In Show

Ryan Eder is one of the most persistent entrepreneurs we're honored to know, so it's a thrill to see his life's work recognized on a grand stage. Eder, founder and CEO of IncludeFitness, has just won three major awards-- Gold, Best in Show and Design for Equality-- at what is essentially the Olympics of design-- the 2016 International Design Excellence Awards.  

1700 entries from 30 countries.  Winning gold in 2016 puts Eder in impressive company: BMW Group, GE Healthcare, Google, Nokia Design and Samsung Electronics are among the most recognizable brands on the planet who also won 2016 IDEA Gold.  But it was Eder's creation, The Access Strength, that was judged Best in Show.  And this was Ryan Eder's second Best in Show.

The Access Strength pairs a HIPAA- compliant digital health platform with inclusive fitness equipment that is accessible to people of all abilities and mobility, lowering barriers to fitness and rehabilitation. Ryan's light bulb moment struck more than a decade ago in an unlikely place-- a west side gym.  He saw a wheelchair-bound man struggling with fitness equipment, and then dedicated his senior thesis at University of Cincinnati to designing a piece of inclusive fitness equipment.  

Those renderings won Gold, Best in Show and People's Choice in the 2007 International Design Excellence Awards. Eder says winning Best in Show again, after a decade of working to bring his vision to life,  is a level of validation that goes far beyond the first awards. "The first award validated the concept and launched a journey that opened up a lot of opportunities," said Eder.  "This is the real platform that is going to market.  To take the concept and completely redesign it and develop and add the digital platform, and then to receive this recognition again, it's almost hard to put into words.  What we have now is very much the tip of the iceberg, and it's exciting to think about the people we can help going forward."

You can read the Industrial Designers Society of America's news release here, which notes, "The digital health platform provides value to payers, providers and patients/consumers in the healthcare system—pairing HIPAA-compliant cloud software with inclusive fitness equipment to lower barriers in fitness/rehabilitation for consumers, and to optimize the delivery of care for providers." Winning IDEA Best in Show twice is exceedingly rare.  We've reached out to IDSA to find out how many other designers can claim this accomplishment.

Returning to Ryan's persistence, The Enquirer's Paul Daugherty captured it beautifully in a June 2016 column called "Chalk One Up For the Human Spirit."