Fitness Assistance Using Motion Sensor

Motion sensors are now a standard feature on most wearables and smartphones, providing a consistent and portable tracking solution across diverse settings even in varied environments. Acknowledging the transformative impact of these sensors in enhancing users’ lifestyles (e.g., sleep monitoring and running rhythm tracking), this chapter explores a virtual fitness coach leveraging users’ wearable mobile devices (including wrist-worn wearables and arm-mounted smartphones) to assess dynamic postures (movement patterns & positions) in workouts. Our system aims to help users achieve effective workout and prevent injury by dynamically depicting the short-term and long-term picture of their workout based on various sensors in wearable mobile devices. In particular, the system recognizes different types of exercises and interprets fine-grained fitness data (i.e., motion strength and speed) to an easy-to-understand exercise review score, which provides a comprehensive workout performance evaluation and recommendation. The system has the ability to align the sensor readings from wearable devices to the human coordinate system, ensuring the accuracy and robustness of the system. Extensive experiments with over 5000 repetitions of 12 types of exercises involve 12 participants doing both anaerobic and aerobic exercises in indoors as well as outdoors. Our results demonstrate that our system can provide meaningful review and recommendations to users by accurately measure their workout performance and achieve 93% accuracy for workout analysis.