Project Description

A majority of today’s jobs consist of long hours spent seated on a chair. To make things worse, the overall lifestyle in America has progressively become sedentary. Its no surprise back problems have become an increasing epidemic in this country and all around the world. Due to this, there has also been an increase in demand for posture-correcting gadgets. This project seeks to be a solution to this ever growing problem.

The main objectives for our project are to adequately analyze the user’s posture, notify the user after a prolonged period of inactivity, and to give helpful suggestions on how to improve their posture. The Posture Perfect will be different than any other gadget in the market intended to improve posture because it isn’t attached to the chair or the person. We are creating a “smart” chair that will not only provide the support the user needs need but it will improve their posture as well. In order to do that, it must first understand what a correct posture is defined as for each user. This will be the most grueling task for us as developers. The Posture Perfect will use all the sensors placed on the chair in order to decide what is deemed as good posture for each user. There will be sensors on the back rest of the chair which no other device in the market has. These will be used to read the curvature of the spine. A distance sensor will be used alongside pressure sensors that will be placed on the lower part of the backrest. Distance sensors will be used in order to read the neck placement. This will help the chair determine if the user is slouching. If a user’s head is overly inward then they must be slouching especially if all other sensors point to the user being close to the backrest of the chair.

In addition, there will be pressure sensors placed on top of the chair seat. The sensors will be individually placed across the entire seat. These sensors are extremely important because they will show if a user is favoring one side over another. In other words, it will check if the user is putting more weight on either side; this will help in determining the user’s posture. If the user spends a prolonged period favoring a side we will notify them to straighten up with vibration motors. Similarly, if the user spends a prolonged period of inactivity we will also notify them by vibrating the chair. We will develop a system in order to differentiate these different notifications. One way of doing this is by setting each notification to a different amount of vibrations. That way if the user feels multiple vibrations then they will know it means its time to get up and stretch or go for a brisk walk.

Subsequently, the sensors spread across the chair must come together to notify the user when their posture is incrementally becoming worse. Additionally, the algorithm must be well designed in order to accurately read and determine if the user’s posture is out-of-place. There will be a variety of flags set into place so that if any are triggered then the chair will alert the user to straighten up. The chair will communicate with the “cloud” in order to do most of its calculations. The mobile application will connect to the data stored in the “cloud” and present the information gathered neatly to the user. They will be able to see the amount of time spent sitting down, and other sitting tendencies. Alongside, a “hotspot” map of where pressure is being applied the most while the user is seated.