Stay Healthy in the Gym
Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the fitness industry worldwide was healthiest it had ever been. However, the pandemic has affected very dramatically the fitness world and the consequences are substantial. The most important one is that the traditional model of “brick and mortar” fitness has become outdated. The fitness service has to be improved. And advanced technology (like AI and CPS) is the key for this transformation.
Healthy Fitness will pave the way for a new generation of technology-driven fitness services which put the trainee in the center of the digitization, as illustrated in the following figure.
| Partner | Role | Expertise |
|---|---|---|
| Smart4Fit | Technology provider | Provides software for monitoring fitness training as a basis for developing new AI-based monitoring system offering above mentioned health-related services during fitness training |
| Technology Park Ljubljana | DIH | DIH supporting SMEs and Midcaps in their digital transformation as well as enhance their role as agents of transformation of the whole Slovenian health and care system. |
| Urban Fitness | End-user | Fitness club in Serbia, providing its facilities for the experiment. |
Indeed, the digitization in fitness was mainly driven by the new, digital equipment, enabling so called connected studio. However, the trainees remain mostly digitally-disconnected and this proposal will change the situation by relaying on:
- IoT/CPS technologies for connecting trainees in the digital fitness world
- AI technology for deriving new knowledge about the trainees’ performances and how to improve them leading to Personal Digital Twin paradigm.
Briefly, by using wearables technology (fitness trackers, smartwatches) and IoT (smart devices, like blood pressure monitor, smart scale) the personal data from a training is collected and integrated/interpreted in the training context, in order to define the relation between the training performances and the health status. Moreover, advanced data analytics and AI will be used for learning how to maximize the performances and minimize the risk for any health problems, creating a very comfortable digital environment for new fitness experience.
We argue that offering health-check services and active monitoring of the health status during the training, can be very strong arguments for motivating people to come back to gyms, even to bring new members, like the people with chronical diseases, who can be monitored on specific parameters (like blood sugar for the diabetes).
We argue that the introduction of more CPS-based technologies would support this transformation in the optimal way and the main objective of this proposal is to provide a PoC (proof of concept) with a big fitness club (Urban Fitness), that this process can be done in an efficient, affordable and reusable way. Partner Smart4Fit provides software for monitoring fitness training (focused on measuring “only” heart rate) and this software will be used as a basis for developing new AI-based monitoring system offering above mentioned health-related services during fitness training. Services from the selected DIH will be used for boosting the PoC and its promotion through the HealthDay.si Platform. If successful, the system will be exploited in tens of partner clubs.
