This article was published in the Winter 2021 issue
by Kyle D.C. Poulin, CEO, True Adherence, Inc.
All right, let’s be honest here. 2020 was either a boon or a bane to your waistline. Maybe you were one of those people during lockdown that found at-home exercise was your path to losing weight and being healthy. Or perhaps you were one of those who added the quarantine 15 or more. As for me, well, I managed to damage my foot which resulted in surgery and a total recovery time of a year. With the arrival of 2021, I’m looking forward to changing up my fitness performance for good.
What the Fitness?
Before I go further, a fitness article in a technology magazine? What’s going on here? Some context. I’m a fitness enthusiast turned certified personal trainer. I’ve hosted fitness challenges, rapidly transformed my body (I once shed 64lbs in 12 weeks), CrossFit-ed (with good coaches, it’s fantastic), and done the home gym thing.
From my personal experience and working with clients, figuring out fitness is hard. Frankly, it’s part of why I put in the effort to become a certified trainer. Now, I’m assuming you’re not running out to get certified, but you’d like to improve your fitness experience and know why you’re doing a particular exercise. I get it. The first time I did Glute Cable Pull Throughs, I thought my coach was insane. Today, it’s one of my favorite glute isolation exercises. Before you Google that movement, maybe wait a bit. It’s not NSFW, but it’d be a bit unusual to look at that particular lift on the clock.
Fitness Improvements
So, what can I do for you in 2021 to up your fitness game? Well, let me introduce you to True Adherence. We use depth-sensing cameras and artificial intelligence to adapt workouts to your specific needs. Have you burned your legs out skiing this weekend? True Adherence will be nice to you on leg day. Or mean. It depends on how you feel about foam rolling sore spots and doing mobility work to recover from the damage you did. Want to shed the Quarantine 15 but have a bad back? It’ll adapt your movements. True Adherence will work with you where you are, and take you toward your fitness goals.
Hyperpersonal Tech
So how is this possible? True Adherence uses artificial intelligence to process data from our depth-sensing camera (think XBOX Kinect) to understand how you are moving. The first time you use True Adherence you’ll be taken through a few initial assessments. First, it scans your body in standing position. Then, you’ll do some quick movements like squats. By scanning you at 30 frames-per-second, True Adherence can quickly learn about your flexibility, bone length (we’ve seen people with one femur 1-inch longer than the other), and if you favor sides of your body. From there, you answer some questions about your goals and fitness history. With that, you get your first personalized workout plan that True Adherence will guide you through with everything from cue coaching to counting your various performance stats. All of that information helps the AI generate future workout routines based on what you want to achieve.
Trainers of the Future
Often people ask me, “Will this replace personal trainers?” The short answer: Heck no! As much as our AI will build a program for you, it’s mainly leveraging physical factors. Think of True Adherence as a dutiful personal training assistant. As a human being, you know that exercise includes mental and emotional elements as well. Personal Trainers are a fantastic way to help tackle the mental and emotional aspects of training. So, the long answer, True Adherence aims to enhance how trainers work with clients. We’re in a new paradigm where people want to continue working out at home, but need some help physically, emotionally, and mentally. Virtual training is okay, but trainers are information limited and time-constrained. True Adherence captures data that will keep the trainer informed and allow them to “work” with clients even if they aren’t watching the video in real-time.
The Lowdown
Like any fitness journey, developing a meaningful fitness technology takes time. We’ve been working on True Adherence since 2018 and are launching our initial product (with the vetted AI adaptations I outlined above) in Fall 2021. If you want access to the current version of our technology, with helpful cues and exercise guidance, we have Beta versions of our product in Utah based partner gyms and we’ll soon include locations around the United States.
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*Read the latest issue of Silicon Slopes Magazine, Winter 2021
