Finding Centre of Gravity of Yoga Asana Postures to support Self-Assisted Yoga Practice

Abstract

Self-assisted yoga practice should ensure safety. Being in a wrong posture while doing practice may cause problems like fall or fractures in the bones. Practitioners of activities like yoga, sports etc. should maintain correct postures all through their practice. Maintaining a correct posture is influenced by Centre of Gravity whose location is based on distributing the entire body weight evenly for stability. In this paper, we propose a method to find the Centre of Gravity of any asana sequence. The location of Centre of Gravity will be used by the assistive system to instruct the practitioner how to alter their postures to avoid fall and enable to take-up perfect practice. Motion capture systems will give the details in the form of Biovision hierarchy format, from which the coordinate values of human joints can be accessed. Based on the segmentation method, whole body Centre of Gravity is calculated. We have used Vrikshasana for our experiment and yoga posture data for ten participants are used to find the Centre of Gravity variations. Data for two trails were acquired. CM Variations in segments like thigh, angle are calculated. From the results the instructors may find whether ankle or thigh’s position should be changed to maintain correct posture.