Received: February 2, 2017 85 International Journal of Intelligent Engineering and Systems, Vol.10, No.3, 2017 DOI: 10.22266/ijies2017.0630.10 A Real Time Monitoring System for Yoga Practitioners Prasanna Mani 1* , Arunkumar Thangavelu 2 , Akshat Sharma 2 , Nikhil Chaudhari 2 1 School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, India 2 School of Computer Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore, India * Corresponding author’s Email: prasanna.m@vit.ac.in Abstract: Now a days a majority share of people undergoes through some health problems or mental stress. The reason for both may be many factors like unhealthy food habits, lack of doing body exercise, pressure from family and job environment etc. These factors can physically and mentally deteriorate the creativity and productivity of a person. Yoga can be considered as one of the finest solutions in this case though it refreshes both physically and mentally. Yoga transforms a person balanced with mental, physical and spiritual elements in the right composition. In this technology era, it will be good to integrate yoga with the trends of technology. This work proposes a scheme of integrating and monitoring yoga activities using the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) and a smart application. The body sensors (Pressure, temperature, humidity) attached with the person doing yoga senses relevant data and is processed using a central processor (Smart phone or smart devices) to provide necessary suggestions or feedbacks to the user. This work will provide a platform to the yoga practice person to monitor and review their yoga activities by themselves. Our research results claims that the various parameters like blood pressure, temperature and heart beat rate is improvised a lot after practicing yoga. Our survey results with the yoga persons doing this IoT based yoga system shows that our system is much helpful for the yoga persons to practice yoga efficiently and effectively. Keywords: Real time monitoring, Yoga, Meditation, IoT. 1. Introduction Yoga is an ancient practice of mental, physical and spiritual exercise. Various clinical studies proved that practicing yoga can reduce health risks and can be utilized for psychological healing process. About 75% of investment in healthcare is spent on lifestyle related chronic conditions like cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer.[1] The solution to these conditions are simple, but the implementation takes a bit of determination and motivation. With little persistent efforts, over the course of several months, can help the human body fight and even develop the immunity against these lifestyle related medical conditions. Yoga has shown promising results in fighting against many conditions including metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. [2][3][4] Yoga is very different from gym and athletics. Activities like gym depend on pushing the body to the limits and bearing more and more stress. This stress is benign for very young adults, but the lifestyle followed by adults and middle-aged people asks for more focus on work. This leaves them paying less attention to their health and the effects starts to show up later. Yoga stress on balance of mind, body and spirits. The postures are not very hard for people whose age ranges between 25 and 45. Adding to that, Yoga has many alternative exercises. A fit body can be achieved by home practised yoga rather than mild athletics (running, jogging) and mild gym exercises. Yoga provides a much softer way to keep the human body in check and prevent many diseases. Studies [5,6] have tried to determine the effectiveness of yoga practices against diseases like cancer, schizophrenia, asthma and heart diseases. It has been scientifically concluded by Sovova [7] that despite low energy expenditure, yoga practices are better in some cardiorespiratory fitness parameters