Smart-Mat: Recognizing and Counting Gym Exercises with Low-cost Resistive Pressure Sensing Matrix

Abstract

There is a large class of routine physical exercises that are performed on the ground, often on dedicated ”mats” (e.g. pushups, crunches, bridge). Such exercises involve coordinated motions of different body parts and are difficult to recognize with a single body worn motion sensors (like a step counter). Instead a network of sensors on different body parts would be needed, which is not always practicable. As an alternative we describe a cheap, simple textile pressure sensor matrix, that can be unobtrusively integrated into exercise mats to recognize and count such exercises. We evaluate the system on a set of 10 standard exercises. In an experiment with 7 subjects, each repeating each exercise 20 times, we achieve a user independent recognition rate of 82.5% and a user independent counting accuracy of 89.9%. The paper describes the sensor system, the recognition methods and the experimental results.