Smart pose: mobile posture-aware system for lowering physical health risk of smartphone users

With the widespread use of smartphones, users tend to use their smartphones for a long period of time with unhealthy postures, bending forward their upper body including the neck. If users keep such an unhealthy posture for a long time, their neck and back muscles get chronically strained, which might cause diseases such as cervical myalgia. To prevent these diseases, we propose a new methodology to monitor the posture of smartphone users with built-in sensors. The proposed mechanism estimates a value representing user postures like head/neck tilt angle by analyzing sensor data from a front-faced camera, 3-axis accelerometer, and orientation sensor. It then informs the user if the estimated value is maintained within the abnormal range over a pre-defined time.