The proposed research focuses on harnessing the growing fitness spaces in support of form, performance and injury prevention in exercise, therapy, and rehabilitation. The ability to monitor body dynamics and to provide real-time feedback is instrumental in fitness training and injury prevention. Motivated by the lack of fitness training models that understand the key factors related to human motion in the cyber realm, this project aims to leverage the cyber-physical components of fitness monitoring to track and encourage proper movement during strength training. The proposed framework distills body dynamics into form and performance measures that can assist application developers with the design of novel fitness and movement-based applications. This project will create knowledge that can be ported across the fitness, therapy and rehabilitation domains and will have a broad impact in the health community. For example, the findings of this project can potentially help devise a training regimen for breast cancer and other post-surgery rehabilitation patients.
This project includes three key thrusts that aim to bring the advancements in cyber-physical systems to the realm of fitness monitoring. First, exploring and understanding fundamental metrics in biomechanics, which form the foundational tools to measure longitudinal performance changes. Second, developing stochastic models to faithfully capture the dependencies of various attributes during physical motion for analyzing user progress. Third, designing a feedback system that engages the user, leading them to improved form and performance. The core contribution of this research is in monitoring and creating models to understand factors pertaining to users' motion that affect their progress over time. Access to real-time feedback on fine-grained motion will transform the way people perform targeted physical movements, reducing their injury risks and enhancing users' experiences in any fitness environment.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
