A smart office chair that detects how you sit using sensors and artificial intelligence could one day coax you into sitting better.
聽at Huawei Technologie and his colleagues installed grids of pressure sensors on a swivelling, adjustable chair. Each sensor, placed on the seat or backrest, sends out a voltage that differs depending on the pressure placed on it.
The device feeds the sensor data into a so-called neural network hosted on a control unit attached to the rear of the chair, which can then identify how people are sitting. Such neural networks attempt to echo the thought processes that go on in our brains, introducing randomness that aids understanding.
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鈥淲e wanted the system to be not only smart enough, but also wanted to mimic the functions of brains,鈥� says Dong, who was at the University of Ottawa, Canada, when he did the work.
To test the system, the researchers asked 19 participants to sit on the chair in different positions. The neural network was able to identify and classify 15 different postures with an accuracy of 88.5 per cent. Among the positions tested were sitting with a rightward or leftward lean, leaning back into the chair, sitting upright and slouching down into the chair. Variations on all these positions combined to create the different postures.
The idea behind this is to lay the groundwork for a system that recommends how you should change your sitting position to ensure it aligns with one recommended by health and safety studies.
worldwide have pain caused by musculoskeletal conditions, according to the World Health Organization. This can sometimes stem from sitting in incorrect positions. 鈥淲e want chairs to alert people if they did not sit properly,鈥� says Dong.
鈥淭his paper states we have this technology we can put in a chair and has proven we can have a pressure allocation, a very smart algorithm, and get some categorisations out of that,鈥� says at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In 2012, he helped develop .
The next step will be to harness the data from the new chair to improve people鈥檚 posture and make suggestions about how to sit, says Netten. Making posture corrections is difficult to do, however, and what constitutes 鈥渟itting properly鈥� is still contested, he says.
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