Human movement science-informed multi-task spatio temporal graph convolutional networks for fitness action recognition and evaluation

Abstract

In recent years, with the rise of health consciousness, people’s demand for fitness has steadily increased. Utilizing automated human action recognition technology to monitor users’ movements during exercise continuously would help prevent situations where incorrect movements lead to injuries while working out. Skeleton-based human action recognition methods can overcome the susceptibility of past color-based and depth-based methods to various external backgrounds and noise, becoming a more successful solution in recent years. In this study, the auto-fitness advisor system we propose not only identifies the category of the action but also assesses the quality of the action and provides suggestions. We integrate human movement science, such as the Five Primary Kinetic Chains (5PKC), which defines the primary physiological principles in human movement, to enhance the accuracy of fitness action recognition by providing a more precise relationship between the human skeleton and muscles. For assessing the quality of movements and providing suggestions, we have designed a multi-task objective function within our model. Overall, the proposed model is a multi-task model based on Spatio Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN), which employs the Five Primary Kinetic Chains (5PKC) as a partitioning strategy for skeletal information. In our experiments, we not only collected a certain amount of datasets in gyms to validate the performance of our model but also compared it with other current methods using existing public datasets.