Alpha Mini Social Robot as a Fitness Trainer at Home

Engaging in regular exercise offers numerous mental and physical health benefits. Many people, after the Covid-19 pandemic, started to work out at home. However, performing exercises incorrectly can result in injuries. For this reason, technology can be an effective tool for encouraging physical activity at home, and social robots have emerged as a potential solution for providing fitness training in a safe and engaging manner. A physical robot is often perceived as more socially attractive compared to virtual agents. Despite the growing popularity and existing literature on social robotics-based fitness solutions, there is a lack of research examining the accuracy of these systems and interventions at home during physical exercise recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing the Ubtech alpha mini social robot, which possesses motor capabilities to demonstrate exercises. We endowed the robot with the capability to recognize exercise correctness and motivate users to engage in physical activities. In this project, first of all, a new dataset of physical exercises was created, including 1,500 videos of physical exercises. Then, a new approach to recognize physical exercises from image sequences was presented. This method was implemented in a personal social robot to recognize physical exercises using a deep learning model. The results of the study validate the effectiveness of the system in recognizing physical exercises through the camera onboard a personal social robot.