Virtual Yoga Instructor with Real-Time Feedback

Yoga is widely recognized for its physical and mental health benefits, but existing resources like video tutorials, mobile apps, and online classes often lack personalized feedback, making it difficult to ensure proper posture and avoid injury. For individuals with disabilities or limited mobility, these challenges are even greater, as traditional resources may not cater to their specific needs. Previous studies show that incorrect posture during yoga can increase the risk of discomfort or injury, highlighting the importance of proper alignment and personalized feedback for safe practice. In this paper, we introduce the virtual yoga instructor application which consists of a virtual instructor and a feedback module via pose estimation. The virtual instructor, implemented in Unity game engine with an animated 3D humanoid model, demonstrates yoga poses. The feedback module uses pose estimation to detect and analyze human body landmarks, generating scores and providing feedback through text and visual markers to guide users in achieving accurate yoga postures. The conducted user evaluations assess the application performance based on the criteria of ease of use, interaction, informativeness, engagement, and retention. The results indicate that our proposed application was highly rated and consistently preferred by users.