Have you ever wanted to make sure you were accurately counting reps in your workout routine?

Now you can, with RapidRoutines, a rep counter and AI fitness chatbot created by Ben Gershenovich, a junior at Newton North High School, and Jai Patel, a junior at Framingham High School. By uploading a video of yourself, the program will match your body to its exercise library, allowing you to be sure you’ve counted accurately. It also answers questions about common body weight exercises.

Gershenovich and Patel are interested in both computer science and working out, and they wanted to find a way to merge these interests. They thought a chatbot that could offer fitness advice, particularly in an age when a lot of online fitness advice is poor, would be a great way to do so.

The rep counter seemed like a natural addition: if you’re offering advice on how to do body weight exercises, why not make a way for people to know they’ve done as many as they’ve hoped?

The program looks at the uploaded video and calculates the angles of the person’s body to make sure the rep was completed accurately.

It currently has seven exercises: bicep curl, squat, push-up, shoulder press, floor tricep extension, lunge, and Russian twist. It also lets users create workout plans for themselves, with instructions on how to do each exercise.

It’s taken longer than the boys hoped, but they’ve learned a lot about computer science through the course of developing their program.

“We started February last year, and we didn’t know a lot about AI,” said Patel.

While there’s plenty of free information online about how to develop AI tools, creating a workable product is easier said than done. A chatbot that’s easy to use has a lot going on in the backend to make it easy to use. They were especially concerned about protecting user data, which is currently one of the big issues when it comes to AI, so their program doesn’t save the data.

“There was always another issue we had to overcome, but it helped us create the best version of our final product,” Patel added.

They initially planned to only market it to other high school students. Neither of them is on a school sports team, so they know it can be difficult to maintain a quality exercise routine without that structure. But after feedback from teachers, they realized that everyone could benefit.

“They all really liked it, and they’re proud of what we’re doing,” said Patel.

Their friends have also been pleased by how accessible and easy to use it is. Now that they’ve officially launched, they’re hoping to be able to add more exercises and more suggestions on routines based on what their new users would like to see.