MobiFit: Contactless Fitness Assistant for Freehand Exercises Using Just One Cellular Signal Receiver

Abstract

Freehand exercises help improve physical fitness without any requirements on devices, or places (e.g., gyms). Existing fitness assistant systems require wearing smart devices or exercising at specific positions, which compromises the ubiquitous availability of freehand exercises. This work proposes MobiFit, a contactless freehand exercise assistant using just one cellular signal receiver. MobiFit monitors the ubiquitous cellular signals sent by the base station and provides accurate repetition counting, exercise type recognition, and workout quality assessment without any attachments to the human body. To design MobiFit, we first analyze the characteristics of the received cellular signal sequence during freehand exercises through experimental studies. Based on the observation, we construct the analytic model of the received signals. Guided by the analytic model, MobiFit segments out every repetition and rest interval from one exercise session through spectrogram analysis, and extracts low-frequency features from each repetition for type recognition. We have implemented the prototype of MobiFit and collected 22,960 exercise repetitions performed by ten volunteers over six months. The results confirm that MobiFit achieves high counting accuracy of 98.6%, high recognition accuracy of 94.1%, and low repetition duration estimation error within 0.3s. Besides, the experiments show that MobiFit works both indoor and outdoor, and supports multiple users exercising together.