SpiMO - Sitting Posture Monitoring System

Back pain is among the most common causes of missing work and contributes to about 93 million lost workdays and $5 billion in health care costs every year. Sitting in an office chair for long periods of time can create lower back pain and can worsen problems that already exist. There are a number of factors that affect back pain, including level of movement, schedule, and desk set-up. Posture is a key factor that can induce pain over time; this includes sitting in the same position for too long or leaning too close to the screen. One may be able to avoid back pain or prevent its recurrence by improving the physical condition and learning and practicing proper body mechanics. We propose an efficient and time-effective tool to support the maintenance of a healthy position a smart pillow. This pillow will track one’s sitting posture on the chair, provides alerts when you don’t have a right posture, provide you tips for exercises based on your posture, allow you to set up goals regarding your position and remind you when to take a break and sit-up. The current paper offers development details related to the proposed innovative product, both from the hardware point of view (the pillow with sensors) and from the software point of view (the mobile application gathering signals from the pillow and providing learning alerts to the user), in the context of other similar applications available on the market and useful in learning how to have a healthier lifestyle. Author