Posture Alert

Desk-based office workers typically spend a high amount of time sitting in the chair every day and often in prolonged unbroken bouts. They do not always sit properly as they are not aware of sitting instructions and their sitting posture. Excessive time spent in a wrong seating position is a major source of health problem and a leading cause of pathological degeneration of the vertebral disc. In this paper, we present a smart chair solution to remedy these problems by analyzing the sitting posture of the person and keeping him informed about his posture. The chair sends a real-time alert to the user whenever a wrong sitting posture is detected for a prolonged period of time, resulting in posture improvement and reducing the risk of repetitive stress injuries (RSI). We offer a solution by applying the Internet of Things techniques to create an intelligent decision-making environment. By analyzing the pressure on different positions of a chair, we recognized different sitting postures. Real-time feedback is provided through an accompanying smartphone application alerting the users to correct their body balance. The system also generates summaries of postures and the activities over a specified period of time. Finally, We conducted experiments to observe the response of the users sitting posture to the alerting feedback. The experiments demonstrated a classification accuracy of around 95% and a significant reduction in the time spent in the wrong posture.