Poor to Proper Posture
The Problem
Sit Straight!
The modern world is almost entirely dominated by electronics and many people today find themselves stationary for hours at a time, whether it be sitting behind a monitor at an office or behind a steering wheel. While being stationary, many individuals inherently suffer from poor posture which can cause many long lasting negative effects for overall health, being detrimental both mentally and physically. To solve this epidemic problem, our group has designed a wearable system that will detect when a user hunches and then notify them through a small, continuous vibration that will stop once the user goes back to proper posture. As a result, the user is able to target their posture habits directly. Our product will be entirely battery powered and last at least 20 hours as well as have wirelessly charging, and users will be able to connect with the device over bluetooth to view progress.
Our Product
- Detect User posture using curvature sensor
- Vibrate at the most problematic area to notify user’s bad posture instead of forcing the user in uncomfortable position
- Help user to create good habit through their own effort
In the video on the right, Odom is demoing our latest and greatest prototype. We first calibrate the system. When the test subject is in proper posture, Karl(the camera man) pressed the button to signal the system the proper posture. When the test subject is in bad posture, we press a different button to signal the system the bad posture. Then the system will use those data and a hard coded percentage value to determine whether the current posture of the test subject is bad or good posture. And in this demo, bad posture is shown by the blue LED on the board lighting up. As shown in the video, when the test subject hunches the blue led on the board lights up as expected. Appology for the bad camera angle when the test suject is in side view where the LED light is very dim.
The Poor to Proper Posture system communicates with the curvature sensors to determine the angle of the user’s posture. Then the microprocessor will calculate the percentage of the users posture compared to hunching level based on the initial calibration of the proper and hunching posture that was set by the user. Once the hunching threshold is met, the vibration sensor will start buzzing within 5 seconds, if the user hunches for at least 4 seconds consecutively in that period(to account for miscellaneous daily actions such as picking up objects off the ground). All the while sending constant data back to the app to give a graph of the user’s progress, to help them know how often they are hunching and what their posture is like. As a result helps build healthy posture habits through vibrations on the back compared the the back brace which is a more forceful method.
THE TEAM
Karl Shao
O-Dom Pin
Kiet Tran
Tong Shen
