Sit smart , stay healthy Eat, drive, relax and work – most of the time we are sitting. As office work involves the largest chunk of time in the day, SitSmart has developed a smart cushion for the office as a mentor for healthy sitting. Society Health © Africa Studio, Shutterstock Sitting at work can be a deceptively harmful pastime, leading to possible organ damage, muscle degeneration and particularly back problems. A sedentary posture needs constant vigilance for damage limitation against bad sitting postures. More than 8 out of 10 Germans report back pain at least once in their life and musculoskeletal disorders are the main cause for sick days in office workers there. SitSmart and improve your health The EU-funded project SitSmart has the ideal solution – an innovative seat cushion to improve sitting behaviour at the workplace. Researchers have developed a sensor-equipped seat cushion that detects unhealthy sitting postures like leaning forward for too long or sitting in the same position for too long without changing. To alert the user and provide real-time and long-term feedback, the cushion is connected to a mobile app that sends a reminder to stand up after 30 minutes and provides suitable exercises. The SitSmart cushion really is smart. It recognises the sitting position while keeping track of the sitting time. Next step is to compare this to appropriate health guidelines and then notify the user to change sitting position if necessary. “With SitSmart, we aim to support healthy lifestyles, reduce sick days from work and end up with a faster recovery time for back pain patients,” explains Johannes Heering, CEO and co-founder of the coordinating company, Fitbase Institute for Online Prevention GmbH. Evaluation in real offices The SitSmart project constructed 10 prototypes that were used in pilots together with the Android mobile app and the online coaching system. There is also a demo video and a promotional video. “We fully achieved all milestones and the results are very promising,” reports Heering. One significant result is that sitters had taken note of the ‘advice’ and sitting time was reduced from 6.6 hours a day in the beginning to 6.3 hours at the end of the period. Challenges from the chair As SitSmart was an innovation project, the project members faced many challenges and problems. “In the first prototype the machine learning model was not able to distinguish between normal sitting and leaning back so we decided to add another backseat electrode to increase the number of sensing points,” explains Heering. Initially, the average precision in recognising each posture with prototype 2 was roughly around 95 %, but there was a need to further improve and develop new prototypes. The researchers decided to produce their own printed circuit board that contains all the components specifically needed for SitSmart. The most current prototype of SitSmart can detect up to seven postures and two further postures and is in the experiment stage. It uses 12 electrodes, 3 on the back support and 9 in the seat. The accuracy of this machine learning model is approximately 98 %. Normalisation and noise issues were tackled by increasing the capacitance. Office chair of the future Fitbase hired an innovation associate to keep working on this innovation after the EU project ends. “To achieve commercialisation, we are applying for the EU-funded SME Instrument and/or we will try to attract investors,” says Heering. He continues: “As well as this, we plan to develop a combination of SitSmart and ergoscan that gives a 3D analysis of sitting posture.” SitSmart really promises to be the future for healthy sitting. Keywords SitSmart, smart, sitting, posture, office, cushion, prototype, back pain, chair
