PNIPU: Application for sports

Main article: Mobile applications

2025: Sports App Introduction

Scientists at the Perm Polytechnic University have developed an application for sports based on machine vision. The university announced this on April 18, 2025.

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Фото: PNIPU

Fitness gadgets and online workouts have become not just a trend, but a need for health in the digital age. The application monitors the performance of exercises and offers a bonus program that includes discounts and other offers from partners for a certain level of recorded physical activity. In 2024, the project took 106th place in the All-Russian ranking "Top 1000 university startups."

The project was implemented under grant No. 2694GSSS15-L/93081 under the Student Startup IV Stage program. Certificate No. 2024683082 has been issued for development.

One of the main problems of our time in the era of digitalization remains a sedentary lifestyle. According to VTsIOM, only about 38% of the population of the Russian Federation systematically train. In addition to lack of time, funds and psycho-emotional resources, a fairly common reason for low involvement in physical activity is lack of motivation.

Users perform tasks (for example, squats or push-ups), which are recorded by algorithms based on the smartphone camera, and receive discounts for this from partners - shops, services and cafes.

The idea of ​ ​ the project arose at school, when I was engaged in street sports grounds. I often noticed that there were fewer and fewer young people there. The guys surrounded bragged about how many hours they gained in computer games, and I came up with the idea that it was possible to raise people's sports motivation through receiving discounts on various goods and services. If each person has an account in the application that calculates statistics for training and gives pleasant bonuses, the same teenagers, instead of competing on the clock in video games, will compete on the hour of training, and the world around will gradually begin to heal - said Rostislav Tyulenev, project manager and general director, student of the department "Development of gas and oil fields" PNIPU.

As of April 2025, the fitness industry already uses machine vision technologies, but existing sports applications often do not take into account local market features and do not offer real tangible rewards for sports achievements.

The peculiarity of our project lies precisely in the business model, which offers bonuses and discounts from partners 10, 15 and 20% for completing certain tasks. Computer vision "crosses" the human skeleton at key points: elbows, knees, hands, feet. The correctness of the execution will be monitored by bending the elbows during push-ups and knees during squats. The number of approaches, 30 push-ups and 50 squats, are determined by the standard for users 30 years old, since this is the average age of people involved in sports. At this stage, we have developed MVP applications (an engine with a minimum set of main functions) and a software module for partners that provides the functionality of setting tasks and providing discounts, "added Pavel Voronov, technical specialist, student of the Department of Gas and Oil Field Development at PNIPU.

In the future, to ensure the safety of the exercises, it is planned to add an input questionnaire to determine the level of user training, video instructions, expand the functionality of the application to full-fledged workouts with its own weight without using additional equipment.

The project attracted 16 partners from various fields, including stores of sportswear, healthy food, fitness attributes, climbing, as well as a massage studio. We plan to enter the market in 2025, expand the block of partners to 50 or more, recruit at least 100,000 users and connect a voice assistant, - said Louise Konogorova, director of the business incubator of PNIPU Growth Dynamics.