Watch out Apple Fitness+. Samsung is looking to one-up Cupertino's workout streaming service with a new virtual personal training feature that can help you avoid injury when working out at home. Unveiled at this year's virtual CES, the new Smart Trainer feature within Samsung Health will track and analyze your posture during workouts and provide real-time feedback about your form.
The Samsung Health Smart Trainer feature will be available through the company's 2021 TVs. It's unclear how it will work, but Samsung says it will also count your reps, estimate your calories burned, and offer post-workout form feedback.
Apple's Fitness+ workout streaming service offers no such feature at this time. In our review of Fitness+, we cautioned users to be careful when doing workouts, particularly HIIT and strength sessions, which can be dangerous to perform without the supervision of a trainer, especially if you're new to working out. Fitness+ does, however, offer a beginner series designed to teach you basic strength, yoga, HIIT, and core moves so you're prepared to do other workouts on the service.
Several high-end smart fitness machines, including the Tempo Studio and Tonal, already offer form feedback.
The Tempo Studio uses 3D motion capture system and artificial intelligence to offer posture corrections as you work out, a feature we found incredibly helpful in testing. Different than a regular camera, the Tempo's 3D motion capture system emits pulses of infrared light 30 times a second, then measures the amount of time it takes that light to travel back to generate a 3D model of your body made up of 80,000 individual points.
It then tracks 25 of your joints, comparing where they are in relation with each other to determine which exercise you're doing and whether you're doing it correctly. When doing a bicep curl, for instance, your wrist point will move as you lift the weight up toward your shoulders, but your elbow point should stay in place. If the system notices your elbow point has moved, it will offer feedback on the screen. When performing a squat, meanwhile, it will correct you if your knees go past your toes.
Tonal recently rolled out a similar form feedback feature, but it's much more basic than Tempo's, mostly offering guidance about your pacing. Tonal currently relies on sensors and gyroscopes to understand your reps, but says it plans to bolster its form feedback feature with advanced camera technology in the future.
Meanwhile, Wondercise's new personal training system, also announced at CES this year, uses sensors to capture upper- and lower-body movements, then compare your posture, pace, and detailed form to a coach, displaying a real-time score to keep you motivated.