A Mobile Application for Assessing the Strength Exercises on Sports Training Equipment

Abstract

The progress in mobile technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) effectively supports the digitalization of sports training equipment. In this demo, we show an assistant mobile application (digital arbiter) to track the quality of exercise performance by the user. We experiment with sports training equipment produced by the MB Barbell company. The exercise is bench press from the chest or similar. The equipment has a mechanism to attach user’s smartphone. The problem is to estimate the lower and upper bounds for each round of execution. The measurement is based on data coming in real-time from the smartphone accelerometer. First, the mobile application can check the correctness as reaching the bounds. Second, the distance and time are estimated that the user has overcome during the exercise rounds. Since each user has own characteristics (e.g., arm length, grip method), individual calibration of the sensor system is needed before exercise performance on a given sports training equipment. Our experiments show that the mobile application has good accuracy and real-time performance, so the digital arbiter can be used as in individual daily physical activity or in mass sports events.

Keywords

• digitalization of sports training equipment
• internet of things
• mobile application
• human movement