Fully Automatic Gym Exercises Recording: An IoT Solution

Abstract: In recent years, working out in the gym has gotten increasingly more data-focused and many gym enthusiasts are recording their exercises to have a better overview of their historical gym activities and to make a better exercise plan for the future. As a side effect, this recording process has led to a lot of time spent painstakingly operating these apps by plugging in used types of equipment and repetitions. This project aims to automate this process using an Internet of Things (IoT) approach. Specifically, beacons with embedded ultra-low-power inertial measurement units (IMUs) are attached to the types of equipment to recognize the usage and transmit the information to gym-goers and managers. We have created a small ecosystem composed of beacons, a gateway, smartwatches, android/iPhone applications, a firebase cloud server, and a dashboard, all communicating over a mixture of Bluetooth and Wifi to distribute collected data from machines to users and gym managers in a compact and meaningful way. The system we have implemented is a working prototype of a bigger end goal and is supposed to initialize progress toward a smarter, more efficient, and still privacy-respect gym environment in the future. A small-scale real-life test shows 94.6\% accuracy in user gym session recording, which can reach up to 100\% easily with a more suitable assembling of the beacons. This promising result shows the potential of a fully automatic exercise recording system, which enables comprehensive monitoring and analysis of the exercise sessions and frees the user from manual recording. The estimated battery life of the beacon is 400 days with a 210 mAh coin battery. We also discussed the shortcoming of the current demonstration system and the future work for a reliable and ready-to-deploy automatic gym workout recording system.