GymSkill: A personal trainer for physical exercises

TLDR

GymSkill is a personal trainer that monitors and assesses physical activity on standard fitness equipment, identifies key data segments, and offers performance improvement suggestions, extending prior work. GymSkill records and analyzes exercises via smartphone sensors attached to gym equipment, applying pyramidal PCBA for fine‑grained activity recognition and quantitative movement quality assessment, and was evaluated in a case study with six participants on balance boards. GymSkill’s quality assessments matched physician judgments, users reported it could motivate and support lay people to overcome sedentary lifestyles, and it is available on the Android Market as VMI Fit.

Abstract

We present GymSkill, a personal trainer for ubiquitous monitoring and assessment of physical activity using standard fitness equipment. The system records and analyzes exercises using the sensors of a personal smartphone attached to the gym equipment. Novel fine-grained activity recognition techniques based on pyramidal Principal Component Breakdown Analysis (PCBA) provide a quantitative analysis of the quality of human movements. In addition to overall quality judgments, GymSkill identifies interesting portions of the recorded sensor data and provides suggestions for improving the individual performance, thereby extending existing work. The system was evaluated in a case study where 6 participants performed a variety of exercises on balance boards. GymSkill successfully assessed the quality of the exercises, in agreement with the professional judgment provided by a physician. User feedback suggests that GymSkill has the potential to serve as an effective tool for motivating and supporting lay people to overcome sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles. GymSkill is available in the Android Market as `VMI Fit'.