Vizzy, the Personal Trainer Robot
Portuguese Robotics research is poised to become a reference in the filed with the creations like Vizzy, a personal training robot created in the scope of one of the Entrepreneurial Research Initiatives of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.
Vizzy will be a personal assistant robot, designed to teach exercise routines and provide physical therapy support, while also ensuring proper exercise form and monitoring physiological responses. This will be accomplished with its motion detectors that, much like the technology currently present in gaming consoles, is able to read the user’s body positioning. But Vizzy will also be able to detect other responses, such as body temperature and breathing pattern to gauge the users physical reaction to the routine and adjusting it accordingly. So, much like human personal trainers, Vizzy will encourage users to keep exercising, even when they say they are tired.
Vizzy is under development within the “AHA – Augmented Human Assistance” project, lead by Profs. Alexandre Bernardino ( ISR-IST-UL ) and Daniel P. Siewiorek (CMU). AHA is one of the six selected proposals of the CMU Portugal Program’s Entrepreneurial Research Initiative in 2014.
Read the full article at Jornal I Online (May 04, 2015)
