Smart Coaching: Enhancing Weightlifting And Preventing Injuries

Getting injured is one of the most devastating and dangerous challenges that an athlete can go through and if it is a big injury it could end his/her athletic career. In this paper, we propose a system to automate the idea of coaching an athlete, by using an IR Camera (Microsoft Kinect Xbox 360) to detect the misplaced joints of the athlete while doing the lift, and alerting the athlete before an injury can occur. We are now able to detect if the lift was correct or wrong and to detect what kind of mistake has been done in the lift by the athlete by using the Fast Dynamic time warping (FastDTW) method. The FastDTW method has outperformed other classification methods and can achieve recognition with 100% accuracy for dependent user movements.