Squatting is an intensive activity routinely performed in the workplace to lift and lower loads. The effort to perform a squat can decrease using an exoskeleton that considers individual worker’s differences and assists them with a customized solution, namely, personalized assistance. Designing such an exoskeleton could be improved by understanding how the user’s muscle activity changes when assistance is provided. This study investigated the change in the muscle recruitment and activation pattern when personalized assistance was provided. The personalized assistance was provided by an ankle–foot exoskeleton during squatting and we compared its effect with that of the no-device and unpowered exoskeleton conditions using previously collected data. We identified four main muscle recruitment strategies across ten participants. One of the strategies mainly used quadriceps muscles, and the activation level corresponding to the strategy was reduced under exoskeleton assistance compared to the no-device and unpowered conditions. These quadriceps dominant synergy and rectus femoris activations showed reasonable correlations (r = 0.65, 0.59) to the metabolic cost of squatting. These results indicate that the assistance helped reduce quadriceps activation, and thus, the metabolic cost of squatting. These outcomes suggest that the muscle recruitment and activation patterns could be used to design an exoskeleton and training methods.

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The growth in self-fitness mobile applications has encouraged people to turn to personal fitness, which entails integrating self-tracking applications with exercise motion data to reduce fatigue and mitigate the risk of injury. The advancements in computer vision and motion capture technologies hold great promise to improve exercise classification performance. This study investigates a supervised deep learning model performance, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to classify three workouts using the Azure Kinect device’s motion data. The model defines the skeleton as a graph and combines GCN layers, a readout layer, and multi-layer perceptrons to build an end-to-end framework for graph classification. The model achieves an accuracy of 95.86% in classifying 19,442 frames. The current model exchanges feature information between each joint and its 1-nearest neighbor, which impact fades in graph-level classification. Therefore, a future study on improved feature utilization can enhance the model performance in classifying inter-user exercise variation.

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