Form Matters

Inspiration

Form is important in sports, and especially in exercise. With a lot of home workouts, and for people who are either just getting into it or don't do it super often, they may skip out on or just not know good form for exercises they do, or in a sport they want to play. This app is for those who want to learn good form (presumably everyone) and those looking to get a good workout from home, without having to go to pay for a gym membership or go out. Bad form can lead to damage to muscles and other injuries, and so we are trying to promote proper exercise and sports form.

What it does

The web application gives users options for many different sports activities, such as soccer, baseball, or boxing, and exercises, mostly ones that can be done from home, such as curls, squats, and pushups. There is also a personalized login mechanism, allowing them to input age, weight, height, and body type, with plans for a more personalized user experience.

How we built it

For this, we are using python3 and Flask to build an interactive web application that can be accessed either through a phone or through a laptop and uses opencv with models that we trained using Google's teachable machine through poses.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, we were going to do a phone application, using react-native. After many hours of work, and many, many errors, we ran into a brick wall and realized that the react-native wasn't going to work as well as we thought. With 5 hours remaining in the project, we completely swapped out our front end and part of our technological implementation. The making of the models took a while, with many of them having to be scrapped. Following that the next issue we ran into was having trouble getting our mode prediction to show up for the demo. Along with that, it took a significant amount of time for our model to train.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our models, we made in a few hours using Google's Teachable Machine, one of which is attached to this. It is our model for boxing, teaching form for a jab. We also made one for basic (single) curls.

What we learned

React-native and Android-Studio are incredibly complicated and very much not beginner-friendly, especially for hackathons.

What's next for Form Matters

What's next is improvements to the model and the skeletal tracking of the user, to allow for better posture recommendations and accuracy checks. We also plan to expand the number of sports forms and home exercises available.