Gesture imitation for a robotic fitness coach

The ultimate goal of ambient assisted living is to help elderly people live a healthy life in the convenience of their homes by making more intelligent technology bring them a set of required assistive tools. In this paper we describe a robotic fitness coach that helps elderly people in their daily exercise activities. The robotic fitness coach learns a set of physical exercises from a professional trainer, and assists elderly subjects in performing these gestures. The gestures were selected from an actual training programme at an elderly care home in order to create a real world scenario.We optimize a function that combines robot stability and appearance similarity in order to find the best mapping from the trainers gesture, observed by an RGB-D camera, to the gesture performed by the robot to solve the mapping problem between human and robot which stems from the embodiment differences.