Fitcam: detecting and counting repetitive exercises with deep learning

Physical fitness is one of the most important traits a person could have for health longevity. Conducting regular exercise is fundamental to maintaining physical fitness, but with the caveat of occurring injury if not done properly. Several algorithms exists to automatically monitor and evaluate exercise using the user’s pose. However, it is not an easy task to accurately monitor and evaluate exercise poses automatically. Moreover, there are limited number of datasets exists in this area. In our work, we attempt to construct a neural network model that could be used to evaluate exercise poses based on key points extracted from exercise video frames. First, we collected several images consists of different exercise poses. We utilize the the OpenPose library to extract key points from exercise video datasets and LSTM neural network to learn exercise patterns. The result of our experiment has shown that the methods used are quite effective for exercise types of push-up, sit-up, squat, and plank. The neural-network model achieved more than 90% accuracy for the four exercise types.