Excuse my posture
Excuse my posture is a chair that can determine of users sitting with good or bad posture and provide feedback to encourage them to remain in good posture. There are 14 force sensitive resistors on the chair’s surface that obtain a coarse measurement that depends on how a user is sitting. A machine learning classifier uses these measurements to evaluate a user’s posture.
The chair encourages users to remain in good posture by providing one of two different types of feedback. The first type of feedback assumes that users are listening to music. As a user drifts in to bad posture, the chair distorts the music by mixing it with Gaussian noise. The relative amplitude of the Gaussian noise gradually increases as a user remains in bad posture, and the noise is removed as soon as a user returns to good posture. We designed this feedback mechanism provide an ambient notification that attempts to minimize interruption.
The second type of feedback plays a loud fart noise after detecting that a user has been in bad posture for at least five consecutive seconds. While this notification is meant to be lighthearted, our initial testing shows it's effective in a social setting.
Andres Calvo, Manisha Mohan