A New Kinect Approach to Judge Unhealthy Sitting Posture Based on Neck Angle and Torso Angle

Sitting posture has a close relationship with our health, keeping right sitting posture is important for people to avoid chronic diseases. However, automatic unhealthy sitting posture detection system is rare, especially for those based on computer vision technology. This paper proposes a new method of judging unhealthy sitting posture based on neck angle and torso angle detection using Kinect sensor. The method tracks neck angle and torso angle as two representative features from the depth image in a given period of time to judge whether the sitting posture is healthy or not. Experimental results show that the proposed method can judge sitting posture effectively for different unhealthy sitting types. Compared with the existing methods of action recognition, our method only needs a Kinect sensor without any other wearable sensors and is time efficient and robust because of only calculating two angles.