World’s first AI-powered motion tracking fitness app

A new fitness app uses worlds first AI-powered motion tracking technology, without the need for additional hardware, to transform your phone into a virtual personal trainer.

Here at Springwise, we have often covered innovations aimed at helping people improve their fitness. Recent advancements have included a fitness tracker worn like a ring and smart clothing that can monitor heart health. Now, a new fitness app has launched which uses AI-powered motion technology to help users achieve the perfect squat. German digital therapy company Kaia Health has developed The Perfect Squat Challenge – an app that allows users’ smartphones to act as a virtual personal trainer.

The Perfect Squat Challenge is free to download. Once opened, the virtual personal trainer guides users through the perfect squat. Additionally, the app tracks the position and movement of 16 key points on the users’ body through the phone’s camera. The app then compares users’ actual pose with an ‘ideal’ pose. Furthermore, it compares metrics, including the relative positions of limbs and joints, and the angles between them. The app offers real-time audio and video feedback and encouragement to help users’ hit their maximum number of squats. The app also allows users to share the number of correct reps on social media, and have their high score feature in a leaderboard.

Later this year, Kaia Health will integrate the AI technology used in The Perfect Squat Challenge in other, pay-to-use, medical device apps. These include a therapy app aimed at relief from non-specific back pain and their ‘Kaia COPD Therapy’ app. They aim to help relieve the symptoms of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Maximilian Strobel, Head of Kaia Health’s AI Lab says: “In the future, this technology will integrate within our medical device app…creating a scalable, cost-effective therapeutic tool.” He points out that this technology democratises access to high-quality, bespoke fitness, rehabilitation and physiotherapy. Will apps like this help people to train better, stay fitter and require less health care?