[lgrebe]

I remember when pose detection was announced, showing an app that corrected your workout movements. i have yet to see an app that actually does that. i'd love to have the equivalent of a personal trainer showing me where i need to adjust my pose in say pushups or other simple excercies.

thus im equally sceptical of seeing these apis used. it seems developers are mostly porting web apps to all platforms ignoring neat but platform specific apis like this.

please prove me wrong and link some awesome apps that use pose detection.

[scottymac]

There are multiple apps in the App Store that do this. I spent last year implementing pose detection in an exercise app and we used both Apple’s pose detection and a 3rd party’s. The pose (each point of the human form) itself was sent to a machine learning backend at around 30 fps, analyzed, and data returned at about the same speed using gRPC. Each exercise had a set of specific feedback for both positioning (“Stand facing the camera with you arms at your side/Stand sideways to the camera/etc”) and form correction (“Raise your right arm higher above your head etc”). Feedback was spoken out loud to the user and there was a relatively complex set of rules governing which feedback got priority and how often feedback was spoken. I also implemented an on-screen “skeleton” of the user’s human form points that rendered on top of the camera view. Pretty fun project from a tech point of view.

[supermatt]

The signal to noise in fitness apps is high. The mainstream ones don’t do this, or if they do the implementation is so bad it’s not worth using, and discovery of anything else is fraught with shitware that wants a subscription to “unlock” it’s unknown potential.

[paisawalla]

Can you name the app?

[smugma]

What’s the best app you’ve tried?

[whywhywhywhy]

The “there’s an app for that” world where small to medium sized teams can build a very iOS native app that takes advantage of the latest and greatest of the device is long gone.

It’s kinda weird how Apple doesn’t realize this and continues to build for that world. Maybe if they were willing to shift on their % for devs that do build that way but unless they did there just isn’t the audience buying apps outright and the only ways to profit are tricking people into abusive subscriptions or building on ads and their personal data.

Until then no idea why any dev would build just for the Apple ecosystem and not something agnostic.

It’s telling to me that the biggest tech apps of the last 2 years all ran web/desktop first.

[jessekv]

There are still a few, e.g. https://halide.cam/

But if you are successful, there is a chance of getting sherlocked, so its a risky business model.

[kemayo]

> Until then no idea why any dev would build just for the Apple ecosystem and not something agnostic.

The standard reason given is that iPhone users are much more valuable than Android users, in that they're a lot more likely to pay for things. If I'm creating a workout app with a fancy form-correction feature then I might well want to use Apple-platform things that make it quicker to develop, at the cost to me of only slightly restricting my actual market.

[codeflo]

It's not just the machine learning stuff, they have a non-portable approach for everything, including the platform's primary programming language. They still seem to live in a world where a significant niche of developers targets Apple platforms and their bespoke APIs only.

The problem with that world view is that (a) everything with a network effect can't target a single platform anymore, and (b) the business model for old-school professional single-user apps was killed by the App Store.

[fnordpiglet]

I think they seem to be doing fairly well as a company, and part of that is not letting themselves be tethered by a standard to allow competitors equal access to their walled garden. Whether you like that or not, it’s the strategy they’ve taken. They would rather not have your app than distort their platform to accommodate its ability to run on another platform.

For developers the reason to adopt the apple ecosystem is fairly simple. People willing to pay for an apple device are likely willing to pay for a subscription. The apple model is essentially you buy a subscription to their hardware - they release at a regular clip, they anticipate most customers will refresh, there’s no meaningful upgrade path, etc. As a developer I prefer subscriptions over one time purchases because it incentives my maintenance and growth of features for existing customers rather than a never ending grab for new customers. As a consumer while my pocket book certainly prefer one time pay, I actually do see the benefit in incentivizing continuous improvements for existing customers. (I do however wish that apple didn’t hide the subscriptions management so deeply and made it very prominent, and until they do it falls into the abusive category IMO)

[Someone]

> It’s kinda weird how Apple doesn’t realize this and continues to build for that world.

If you’re a hardware manufacturer, I don’t think building for the common denominator of the web browser is a viable strategy. Looking at various of their competitors, it certainly brings in less money.

How many people would buy an iPhone that’s basically a “browser device” if, for 50% of its price, they could get something that’s 80% as good (percentages for illustration purposes)?

[lwkl]

> It’s telling to me that the biggest tech apps of the last 2 years all ran web/desktop first.

What are the two apps that you are referring to? No snark just curious. Because the only thing I can think of are video calls or social media (which are arguably older than two years).

[dmix]

The big question is whether it's even capable of making recommendations like that. You'd have to combine it with your own model.

Having read books on strength training and tried to learn stuff like squatting perfectly myself I'm skeptical it could be to grasp the nuance.

But for dancing and other stuff where it doesn't matter as much it could be useful (health/safety wise when carrying load).

[tough]

Could you share some reads?

[nbaugh1]

There a home gym setup called Tempo that claims to do this. I have the scaled down mobile app version so idk if the full setup is more informative, but it doesn't really give a lot of feedback at all. It basically just tracks the movement of the dumbbell plates that they send you to count your reps, and if you aren't moving the weight to the correct position your rep won't count. It definitely doesn't do anything like correct your form based on your body position like "hey straighten your back" or anything

[agentdrtran]

I switched from the Move to the Studio (freestanding version) and the form feedback triggers __slightly__ more often but it's still not worth bothering about imo. the rep counting not working bothers me way more.

[rickguru]

Hey, I'm the founder of Guru (https://getguru.ai/), a video AI dev platform. Developers are using our movement APIs to build some cool form feedback apps, including NFL coaches.

- Demo: https://www.formguru.fitness/video/c96fa975-fd9e-4912-8f60-1...

- Blog: https://blog.getguru.ai/guru-sports-powering-the-top-prospec...

- Customers: https://www.cadoo.io/, https://www.breakawaydata.com/, https://pharosfit.com/, https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fitx.

We've trained our own models (and customers can finetune them), but it exports cleanly to iOS (and Android!).

[ChrisMarshallNY]

One of the reasons that I write native, is so that I can access stuff like this. It usually takes quite a while for hybrid platforms to catch up.

That said, I don’t have an immediate need for this particular SDK, in the project I’m developing. I just like to have the option to integrate stuff like this.

Also, I’m not a “bleeding edge” developer. I’m still using UIKit/AppKit/WatchKit (as opposed to SwiftUI), and my software supports one OS version back, upon release.

[deeesstoronto]

I'm part owner of a company (Halterix) that used pose detection (alternately via smartwatch accelerometer) and machine learning to quantify how well exercises are performed.

We built a demo app for use in physiotherapy to improve outcomes and ran a few clinical studies. The detection accuracy was excellent and patient reception was warm.

There are a number of competitors, some with multi-sensor systems targetted to pros, some with vision systems, etc.

We met with all the big fitness app makers and found generally while they weree somewhat interested in pose detection/accuracy assessment and feedback, it's not at the top of their list of priorities to implement (even to incorporate our 3rd party service).

[YouWhy]

Proper disclosure: I had been formerly involved with them.

Try Kemtai.com.

There's a demo section at https://app.kemtai.com/sample-workouts

We took workout experience super seriously, and in my biased view, got it to be a usability joy.

[dbtc]

For a more immediate and quite practical solution, I've had good results from simply taking videos of various movements and watching them right afterwards.

[unstatusthequo]

https://www.zerapy.ai/

[SoftTalker]

So hire a personal trainer for a session or two?

[madsbuch]

> it seems developers are mostly porting web apps to all platforms ignoring neat but platform specific apis like this.

I would be weird to have your social app trying to correct your pose ;)

[mbork_pl]

> I would be weird to have your social app trying to correct your pose ;)

It would be less weird for it to call home so that Z*ck knows to serve you ads for painkillers for your spine...