A big problem in our society today is bad posture. Many adults have jobs that force them to sit at a computer for long periods of time, and students also have to sit for almost 6 hours a day at school. Bad posture over time can lead to many muscle and skeletal problems, such as shoulder, back, and neck pain, arthritis, and spinal dysfunction. In fact, between 50%-80% of people foster bad posture, and this can be very detrimental to the overall body health. Therefore, I designed a computing innovation to resolve this issue. Essentially the product looks like a regular chair, but it includes inbuilt sensors which will determine if the person sitting in it is slouching. The chair will feature 4 ultrasonic sensors (sonar sensors), which will detect the distance between the back of the chair and the back of the person sitting in it through emitting high frequency sound waves. If the distance detected from each ultrasonic sensor is about the same, the person sitting has good posture. However, if the distance detected from the top two ultrasonic sensors is longer than the distance detected from the bottom two ultrasonic sensors, or vice versa, the person sitting has bad posture, because their back is not straight. There will be a certain practical range that the 4 distances will have to be in, because it is almost impossible for all 4 ultrasonic sensors to detect the exact same frequency at all times. If the second condition is true for more than 1 minute, the bottom of the chair will start vibrating until the posture is fixed. The reason the minimum time is 1 minute is so that there are no false alarms in case the person sitting just has to move around a little. The vibration will be caused by a dc motor, and it will be just enough for the person sitting to realize, but not loud enough for people sitting around them to get distracted. The bottom of the chair will also include a force sensor to detect when a person sits down. As soon as the force sensor detects a large amount of weight that attributes to someone sitting down, the rest of the sensors will be activated. All types of people will benefit from this product, because bad posture is an issue across the world. This innovation can be implemented into any setting that involves a chair, especially offices and schools. I believe that anyone who uses this product for a duration of time will see improvements, because they will be constantly forced to fix their bad posture while sitting, and the body will adapt to this new position over time. This will reduce common shoulder, back, and neck pains and help the human species live a healthier life.
Diagram of Product:
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