Monitoring of Prolonged and Asymmetrical Posture to Improve Sitting Behavior

Prolonged and asymmetrical sitting has been known to cause severe health problems like musculoskeletal pain, low back pain and spinal deformity. These in turn increase the cost of medical care. If sitting posture could be measured in a user friendly manner it will be possible to take steps to prevent deterioration in the patient's health, reducing the cost of medical care. To meet this goal, we develop and implement a low cost portable automatic sitting posture monitoring system. A pressure sensing system is constructed to measure different sitting postures (active, static or prolonged and asymmetry). The pressure sensors are placed in six different ergonomic locations on a chair. Sitting information is acquired from a healthy office worker for 10 days and stored in a cloud server through Internet of Things (IoT). A smart IoT end point device application is designed and developed to provide real time posture visualization, display daily summary score, customize different thresholds, configure personal notifications and set targets for improving sitting behavior. Experimental results show that high asymmetry is observed in the thigh region comparing with the lower back and shoulder regions. The subject spent 58% time with Excellent, 28% time with Good and 14% time with Poor sitting postures. This posture monitoring system is significantly simplified, making it suitable for office, school and home based assessment and support posture improvement strategies.