Rack the North

Inspiration

The Covid-19 pandemic affected all of us in more ways than one. Essential services all across the province shut down including gyms and athletic services. At a time like this it is easy to lose sight of your own physical and mental health. This is where Rack the North is essential.

What it does

Rack the North is a service that allows users to workout with the help of an online computer assisted personal trainer. The application allows the user to select the workout of their choice. It builds a model around the user to determine their form and provide insightful feedback much like a personal trainer would. With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing everyone to workout from home, it is more important then to have a good form so one doesn't hurt themselved. Rack the North will also count your reps so you will never lose sight of your progress.

How we built it

We built the front-end application using Reactjs and a hint of our imagination. All the vision processing which determines good form, angle based off the exercise and the number of reps that have been hit are done in openCV python. We incorporated microframework Flask to act as a bridge between the Reactjs app and the openCV processing.

All of our team members were responsible for key aspects of the application using git management to finally put everything together at the end.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into were determining the perfect form for various exercises with varying body types. This was done by calculating angles between joints which is consistent between different body types and does not discriminate between the length and width of limbs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that the application is functional and provides insightful information. It is an app that we can see ourselves working on in the future as it has viability in the real world, and using it during our at-home gym sessions.

What we learned

We learnt how to work with live feed video and implementing that into a Reactjs application without lag and buffering. We learnt that even if it gets late and the application doesn't work as long as we work together we can overcome the challenges.

What's next for Rack the North

Rack the South... We plan on implementing more workouts and providing more feedback to the user. We plan on implementing Rack the North with various workout wearables such as the Apple Watch and Fitbit. We are implementing a leaderboard amongst friends so although everyone is working out from home they can workout together.

Built With

• flask
• javascript
• mediapipe
• movenet
• opencv
• posenet
• python
• react