DEVELOPING A SMART CUSHION TO CORRECT SITTING PATTERN USING ARDUINO IOT

With the technological revolution, one rising problem in the 21st century is regarding people’s sedentary life. As the time sitting down increases, the sitting balance is prone to be often uneven. This unhealthy balance affects the body structure starting with the back and the legs, leading to pathological discs in the back becoming squashed. Various devices such as biometric chairs were invented to track the sitting postures to prevent these abnormalities. The biometric chair, however, collects its user's data only where the chair is located. For this smart project, an IoT system was assembled to be embedded in the cushion, allowing the user to collect the user's sitting data continuously. Further, its detachability of the cushion from a chair facilitated the user to enjoy its portability.

A prototype device was created to monitor the sitting posture with the Posture Feedback System (SPFS), which applied IoT technology. This device recorded the sitting data, which was acquired from four pressure sensors, and sent to the Thingspeak server from which the data was plotted and analyzed accordingly. The experiment investigated the SPFS effects on the user's sitting posture, divided into three consecutive stages: Pre-SPFS, SPFS Treatment, and Post-SPFS in a comfortable manner without intentional posture adjustment, and our experiment took three weeks. As the pre-SPFS, the user gathered data while sitting on the cushion for 1 hour a day for a week. The data was then reviewed with the user. And, during the following SPFS treatment, the user sat on the cushion with SPFS intentionally to correct the sitting posture for every hour. Finally, one week later, another acquisition of the post-SPFS data was performed at this time with no intentional effort to change posture. The data were processed and compared to see how much the SPFS system has improved the user's posture. The study concluded that SPFS could improve the user's sitting posture to a more balanced condition. This study might contribute to the prevention of sitting disease before being further aggravated.