Abstract

Background: Health is the major concern of each and every individual. Being fit both physically and mentally is not an easy task. Yoga and meditation is considered as an optimal solution for the same. In Yoga, Yogi (person who does yoga) performs various asanas (body postures) which energize and refresh their body cells and keep them fit. The real purpose of yoga asanas and breathing techniques is to achieve optimal health possibly the best physical condition based on their life style, environment, age and genetics. Various clinical studies claim that yoga can provide improved mental and physical fitness rather than other physical training or stress management techniques.

Objective: Our aim is to increase the performance of the postures of the Yogis, through yoga assistant kit with prediction intelligence which will assist the person to perform suitable yoga postures. This will help the Yogis to achieve more positive results in the practice of Yoga, with highest quality of meditation. The developed IoT kit consists of a hardware module (embedded in wrist band) and a mobile application. The yogi should wear the wrist band while practising yoga. The wrist band consists of various sensors like temperature sensor, pressure sensor, humidity sensor etc. which sense body parameters and store it in a central database. Using neural networks and embedded intelligence our system aims to predict the number of sun salutations a person (yogi) should perform based on the parameters collected from the kit. The results showed that our system works as a virtual trainer which suggests the yogi with the appropriate asanas to be performed based on present body conditions.

Methods: It is safe to wear this light weight wrist band as it is made up of a cotton band. The components are embedded inside the band and is safe to use though it uses button cells as a power source. The system is charged by button cells. It is both economical and safe to use it as the kit is designed in such a manner that it doesn’t cause any sort of skin allergies or side effects.

Discussion: There is no standard yoga assistant kit available in the market as of now. So our proposed kit can assist the yoga performers to perform yoga in an efficient manner. The intention of our kit is not to improve the health of a yoga person instead it focuses on assisting the yoga person with a set of asanas to be performed at a particular body condition. The smart phone version provides live assistance for the yoga performer with relevant videos. The kit doesn’t consist of any expensive components and hence we can market this product in a nominal price. We performed a clinical study in Amrutha Yoga centre and the results showed that it is non allergic and safe to use for both kids and elder persons.

Conclusion: Thus our proposed yoga kit will be an intelligent assistant for every yoga performer to practice yoga efficiently and effectively.

Keywords: Internet of things, machine learning, supervised learning, yoga, health monitoring, asanas.

Graphical Abstract