Technology-assisted Personalized Yoga for Better Health -- Challenges and Outlook

Abstract

Yoga is a discipline of physical postures, breathing techniques, and meditative practices rooted in ancient Indian traditions, now embraced worldwide for promoting overall well-being and inner balance. The practices are a large set of items, our term for executable actions like physical poses or breath exercises, to offer for a person's well-being. However, to get benefits of Yoga tailored to a person's unique needs, a person needs to (a) discover their subset from the large and seemingly complex set with inter-dependencies, (b) continue to follow them with interest adjusted to their changing abilities and near-term objectives, and (c) as appropriate, adapt to alternative items based on changing environment and the person's health conditions. In this vision paper, we describe the challenges for the Yoga personalization problem. Next, we sketch a preliminary approach and use the experience to provide an outlook on solving the challenging problem using existing and novel techniques from a multidisciplinary computing perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that comprehensively examines decision support issues around Yoga personalization, from pose sensing to recommendation of corrections for a complete regimen, and illustrates with a case study of Surya Namaskar -- a set of 12 choreographed poses.