Real-time sitting posture monitoring system using pressure sensor

A Sitting posture is a very important issue for moderns who is mostly sedentary. Also, a wrong sitting posture causes back-pain and spinal disease. Many researchers have been proposed numerous approaches that classifying and monitoring for a sitting posture. In this paper, we proposed a real-time sitting posture monitoring system that was developed to measure pressure distribution in the human body. The proposed system consists of a pressure sensing module (six pressure sensors), data acquisition and processing module, a communication module and a display module for an individual sitting posture monitoring. The developed monitoring system can classify into five sitting postures, such as a correct sitting, sitting on forward inclination, leaning back sitting, sitting with a right leg crossed and a left leg crossed. In addition, when a user deviates from the correct posture, an alarm function is activated. We selected two kinds of chairs, one is rigid material and fixed form, the other one is a soft material and can adjust the height of a chair. In the experiments, we observed appearance changes for subjects in consequence of a comparison between before the correction of posture and after the correction of posture when using the proposed system. The data from twenty four subjects has been classified with a proposed classifier, achieving an average accuracy of 83.85%, 94.56% when the rigid chair and the soft chair, respectively. © The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.