The aim of this study was to develop a physical activity advisory system supporting the correct implementation of sport exercises using inertial sensors and machine learning algorithms. Specifically, three mobile sensors (tags), six stationary anchors and a system-controlling server (gateway) were employed for 15 scenarios of the series of subsequent activities, namely squats, pull-ups and dips. The proposed solution consists of two modules: an activity recognition module (ARM) and a repetition-counting module (RCM). The former is responsible for extracting the series of subsequent activities (so-called scenario), and the latter determines the number of repetitions of a given activity in a single series. Data used in this study contained 488 three defined sport activity occurrences. Data processing was conducted to enhance performance, including an overlapping and non-overlapping window, raw and normalized data, a convolutional neural network (CNN) with an additional post-processing block (PPB) and repetition counting. The developed system achieved satisfactory accuracy: CNN + PPB: non-overlapping window and raw data, 0.88; non-overlapping window and normalized data, 0.78; overlapping window and raw data, 0.92; overlapping window and normalized data, 0.87. For repetition counting, the achieved accuracies were 0.93 and 0.97 within an error of ±1 and ±2 repetitions, respectively. The archived results indicate that the proposed system could be a helpful tool to support the correct implementation of sport exercises and could be successfully implemented in further work in the form of web application detecting the user’s sport activity.

Given the use of high-strength steels to achieve lightweight construction goals, conventional shear-cutting processes are reaching their limits. Therefore, so-called high-speed impact cutting (HSIC) is used to achieve the required cut surface qualities. A new machine concept consisting of linear motors and an impact mass is presented to investigate HSIC. It allows all relevant parameters to be flexibly adjusted and measured. The design and construction of the test bench, as well as the mechanism for coupling the impact mass, are described. To validate the theoretically determined process speeds, the cutting process was recorded with high-speed cameras, and HSIC with a mild deep-drawing steel sheet was performed. It was discovered that very good cutting edges could be produced, which showed a significantly lower hardening depth than slowly cut reference samples. In addition, HSIC was numerically modelled in LS-DYNA, and the calculated cutting edges were compared with the real ones. With the help of adaptive meshing, a very good agreement for the cutting edges could be achieved. The results show the great potential of using a linear motor in HSIC.

Supervised learning as a sub-discipline of machine learning enables the recognition of correlations between input variables (features) and associated outputs (classes) and the application of these to previously unknown data sets. In addition to typical areas of application such as speech and image recognition, fields of applications are also being developed in the sports and fitness sector. The purpose of this work was to implement a workflow for the automated recognition of sports exercises in the Matlab® programming environment and to carry out a comparison of different model structures. First, the acquisition of the sensor signals provided in the local network and their processing were implemented. The functionalities to be realised included the interpolation of lossy time series, the labelling of the activity intervals performed and, in part, the generation of sliding windows with statistical parameters. The preprocessed data were used for the training of classifiers and artificial neural networks (ANN). These were iteratively optimised in their corresponding hyper parameters for the data structure to be learned. The most reliable models were finally trained with an increased data set, validated and compared with regard to the achieved performance. In addition to the usual evaluation metrics such as F1 score and accuracy, the temporal behaviour of the assignments was also displayed graphically, which enabled statements to be made about potential causes for incorrect assignments. In this context, especially the transition areas between the classes were detected as erroneous assignments as well as exercises with insufficient or clearly deviating execution. The best overall accuracy achieved with ANN and the increased dataset was 93.7 %.