How is the latest technology Changing Fitness?
AI is slowly seeping into every area of our lives, and it’s not limited to filtering spam from your inbox and fancy self-driving cars. While many thinkers of the 21st century have warned us about the pitfalls of AI and the risk of one day making a program smarter than us, we can still figure out how to make it work for us in the best possible way. Recently AI and data science is being heavily used by businesses to make smarter marketing decisions. The immense power of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning (a subset of AI) is being used to change and improve one of the key areas of our lives: Fitness.
We have already discussed how AI can help you get better at yoga by personalized posture detection programs in a previous blog-post. In this article, we will take a broader look at the ways in which AI is disrupting the fitness industry.
SMART FITNESS WEARABLES, SMART HEALTHCARE AND DIET PLANNING APPS
Wearable devices such as the apple watch are getting more and more advanced every year. Fitness wearables are capable of much more than just collecting data. AI wearables are pushing their limits by assisting patients and doctors with remote tracking, precautions, remote diagnostics, and helping patients to make smarter choices.
Advanced fitness wearables can detect irregular heartbeat that may indicate a stroke, forecast potential respiratory disorders, or detect signals of diabetes. AI is already being used for shaping individual habits, tracking health and behavior stats, and exercise patterns to guide people in getting healthier.
AI-driven diet planning is also on the rise, they can keep track of your progress and make adjustments in your diet every week, with the help of stats from your wearable devices.
AI BASED PERSONAL TRAINER
AI will be able to predict what exercises you’ll be able to do and want to do based on the data it derives from your devices and making a profile from you. It can create custom workout sets of exercises by learning how you react and what results you are getting.
AI-based personal trainers are the real disruptors of the industry, it can be even more efficient with collaboration between human trainers and AI programs such as the ones capable of human pose estimation.
Human pose estimation is similar to the now widely used face recognition, only instead of scanning your face, this works for your whole body. Using computer vision and AI we can get three different types of data about your posture which are used to make suggestions for posture correction:-
1. Skeletal Modeling: Scanning the skeletal structure.
2. Contours Modelling: Detecting the width of the body’s torso and limbs
3. Volume Modelling: Three-dimensional scan to represent the body in different geometric shapes.
An AI-based personal trainer helps to create individual fitness plans based on your goals, eating habits, current fitness level, and data from your wearable devices. Through computer vision, the AI will be able to detect if you are extending your knees too far, for example. Real-time feedback on workout postures can make you better at yoga and other exercises very fast as we have discussed in a previous article. Posture can make or break your yoga practice.
These were a few obvious ways in which AI is disrupting the fitness industry. But technology evolves fast and we never know how it will transform our life and the fitness industry in the future, but one thing that must remain constant is our effort to keep ourselves fit.