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Geek Throne: A Self-Adjusting 'Smart' Chair
bmongar writes: "An article at Eurekalert mentions that scientists at Purdue University have made a chair that can sense your posture and movement. As a sufferer of low back pain I hope this leads to chairs that can sense your posture and adjust to provide proper support for your back. It would be a possible relief for millions. I can't find the links supporting this, but I believe computer professionals suffer more back pain than professional movers." This is a cool project. This stuff -- furniture, and ergonomics in general -- will only get more important, even if it's still amazingly neglected.
How they recognize the postures is interesting, too -- "Given the similarity between a pressure distribution map from the contact sensors and a greyscale image, computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms, such as Principal Components Analysis, are applied to the problem of classifying steady-state sitting postures," says the article.
Ergo fanatics should check out the chair designed by HumanScale. Not that I can afford the thing, but it seems pretty cool: It automatically adjusts to find you an optimal posture, but it does so with electronics or sensors. It does so with cantilevers, balances, and sliders that adjust to your own movement. Sometimes the most elegant solution has nothing to do with computers ...
Do domain names matter?
Of course computer professionals are going to suffer more back pain than professional movers - if you spend all day moving couches & heavy stuff, you're giving most of the muscles in your body a good workout. If, on the other hand, you spend your entire day doing next to nothing physically (relatively), using a little force in the same direction over and over again, what do you think is going to happen to most of the muscles in your body? One word: atrophy. At least, that's what happens according to the author of Pain Free At Your PC (http://www.bn.com has it too, just can't get that link to work correctly). To quote from the first chapter: "The true source of chronic musculoskeletal pain is rarely the site of the pain. . . . If your wrist hurts while you are pointing and clicking a mouse, the pain probably has nothing to do with the device." The book has four programs of simple exercises (maintenance or light, moderate and power users) specifically designed to work the muscles we're neglecting.
I bought this book right after my doctor perscribed me drugs, and said if they didn't work we'd go for surgery. I don't believe in conventional medicine (aside from when they function as body mechanics), so I bought this book when I saw it at the local food co-op in the hopes that it would have some information dealing with what was causing my "repetitive stress injury". I had actually gone to the doctor to get a referral to a chiropractor, 'cause slashdotters have said they can help. Of course, doctors prefer drugs & surgery to dealing with root causes (what was I thinking?). I haven't been very diligent about doing the exercises, but after reading it I corrected my posture, and my back was damn sore for the next few days. If you suffer from pain while using a computer, Buy This Book. I wish I had found it before purchasing a Datahand keyboard... probably would've saved myself a bathtub of cash.
You know those ergonomic chairs that don't have a back? The one several of you with back problems have tried, but can't sit in for any length of time? The muscles in your body have probably decayed because of poor work habits.. Before you go out and spend $1000 on a chair or keyboard, please spend $10 on this book, and give the e-cises a try.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
"Ergonomics" is a alternatively a meaningless buzzword attached to oddly shaped products, or a pseudoscience of comfort. Either way, it's obvious why it has no rules.
If you are experiencing lower back pain from sitting, even though you have a comfortable chair, you don't need a new, special "ergonomic" chair, you need to get more exercise. Your back is too weak to support you in an upright sitting position.
This isn't rocket science, folks. It's common sense: buy high quality furniture/equipment (higher quality is recognizable by the fact that it immediately feels better when you first change to it, and it feels worse when, after using for several hours, you switch back to a lower-quality piece), rest and stretch when you start to get sore, and get enough exercise. People buy "ergonomic" equipment when they're too cheap to spring for good gear, too impatient to take the necessary rest, or too lazy to get proper exercise. They ignore what common sense tells them is necessary when a group of professional deceivers tell them that there's an easy way out.
As with many of life's problems, the real answers are simple and obvious, just not necessarily cheap or easy.
Examples of the victory of "ergonomics" over common sense:
-a plethora of bizarrely shaped rubber-dome keyboards that don't function nearly as well as the old standard buckling-spring keyboards
-$300 chairs that are adjustable 27 ways with carefully shaped surfaces, but that are underpadded, need constant readjustment because they don't hold their settings, and can be ripped apart with your bare hands
-$60 shaped rounded, asymmetric mice, that are harder to use than $6 nearly square mice
There aren't always ideal solutions that are the best for everyone, but there is plenty of idiotic trash that is worse than useless, and most of it is labeled "ergonomic".
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in addition to the fact that I already waste enough time in front of the monitor, do I really want to be so comfy that I fall asleep coding my latest CS assignment? :)
This is a Good Thing(TM).
I struggled with repetetive stress injuries to my wrists and elbows and have been in the fortunate minority, in that I recovered and was able to adjust my habits and environment to prevent recurring problems. For the newbies out there: learn the right habits and stick to them. For the old school gurus this applies double.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
First, AFAICT, the Purdue project is not a self-adjusting chair... it only senses your position.
But I thought of an idea to build a self-adjusting chair several years ago... a lattice of triangular shapes, and a linear actuator underneath each corner. (But the corners of 3 different triangles meet at each motor, so raising the motor at a point would "pitch a tent"... 3 different triangles angle upwards.) The resultant stretching would require the triangles to be stretchy, so it'd probably be best to make a single sheet of molded rubber for the whole chair, with the triangles being thicker and the joints between them thinner. The triangles should have rounded corners so they don't poke you too much. There would be a strain-gauge type sensor at the end of each motor's shaft. There would be some software which simply tries to adjust all the motors in such a way that the force distribution fits a nice smooth 3d spline patch... thus over a small area of your body, the forces would be approximately equally distributed. The chair frame could be built like a chaise lounge, a seat and a back and a leg-piece each with the adjustable surface, and also with an angle adjustment so that you can either sit up straight or lie down flat or anything in between. You could use it for everything from coding to reading to sleeping: just use a high-resolution projector instead of a monitor, and a wireless keyboard, and a trackball.
Now imagine a futon looking thing made this way... and "presets" which either make a hump in the middle to keep the two people apart, or make one big depression in the middle for cuddling. Kindof erotic. Some hacker would probably write some software to simulate a partner by shaping the surface appropriately. Put on your VR goggles, and shazam...virtual Natalie Portman. Much cheaper than an android if you are happy with the missionary position.
You could also do force feedback for games if the motors were fast enough, but it might be kindof power-hungry with all of them jerking you around at once.
But it would be rather expensive... would require thousands of motors. I also thought of making a webbed chair or loveseat, but having motors on each horizontal and vertical strap, so that the basic shape can be adjusted by adjusting the tensions of the straps... but it wouldn't be quite as flexible. At least it could be built at a reasonable cost.
I sure would hate to see someone monitor the sensors of this chair and log them.
Imagine your next performance review w/ your employer:
"Okay, you were apparently asleep 14% of the time you were here, and we're adding a rider to your health care coverage which invalidates all RSI problems because your posture sucks..."
Still, I can see the value of a chair that would adjust to fit my needs.
Grell
(mind you, that thing better have hella strong servo's to craftsmaticize _my_ tushie)
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
Yes, that's right--a lot of slashdot readers deserve to be lumped into the "...for dummies" category on this subject, simply because you don't know what you're talking about, and you're too damned belligerent to learn. This is your chance.
First rule of ergonomics: There are no rules. Well, no hard and fast rules. I've posted this before, but not enough people seem to realise this important fact: What works for you might not work for your neighbor. If you can code (more likely play Q3) for ten hours straight, and not suffer from it, then that's great news! Fantastic, even! Don't assume that the guy in the office who complains about his back despite putting in "only" 40-50 hours per week is just a whiner, or someone who wants a new toy.
A chair is supposed to support you. If your chair and your muscles work together with your posture, flexibility, etc. to support you painlessly, then enjoy it. This exact solution is not likely to work for most other people. The crux of ergonomics comes down to these two points:
* Everyone is different.
* The human body wasn't built to stay stationary for hours on end.
If you try to get around the second point by putting someone in a situation where they don't move (computing comes to mind--no more typewriter carriages to move by hand, no more coffee breaks, lunches at one's desk...) for hours on end, then you're going to have to do more to tweak that person's environment to work with the specifics of their body. In other words, Ergonomic solutions becomes more individual and unique as the stress on the body increases.
Now let's restress the second point: The human body doesn't like to be at rest.
One of the solutions to muscular stress problems is to give people highly adjustable workstations. The problems here are that (A) people aren't very good at adjusting things so they feel good (surprising but true!), and (B) the perfect solution only works for a while for a given person. Sooner or later, something has to give, and it does. So, we refine the idea: Give people a chair which adjusts to their body without their conscious input, and continues to adjust as they move. This is the idea behind this chair, and several others. Haworth came up with the slogan, "the best posture is the next posture" for their Taz chair, implying that movement is the best solution to (potential) problems caused by sitting all day.
Is it the ultimate solution? No. Is any chair, workstation, or even exercise regime? No. There is no single solution, just a steadily advancing body of knowledge to help those who are suffering a hell of a lot.
And to the idiot who suggested that all of the money going into this field (the research is apparently all done by marketing staff!!!) could be better spent on food, clothing, shelter, and so forth; You might consider the amount of money that goes into computer games, or any computer research for that matter. How much food could we raise for the price of John Carmack's (I think that's him--that ID guy) Ferarri? When you lambaste a company that designs a better chair, it makes me wonder if you just hate to see people not in pain.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
... shifted my body to type with one hand on the keyboard and one hand close to my center of mass while making jerking movements on my chair? /me's like "/me is stroking your back." :)
:)
Hmm... maybe it should also sense the temperature changes in my body so that if I start fogging up the screen and sitting on the edge of my seat it'll tilt and reposition itself so that I'm pushed back into a more relaxed position to prevent a cyber-induced-heart-attack?
What if someone were to hack the chair's hardware, insert some force feedback cabling devices, plug it into USB port, open source the drivers, then make it respond to IRC
God, couple this new chair with the iFeel Mouseman, push the prices down, bundle it with a web-cam + teleconferencing software and IRC, call it the "Cyber-Flex Productivity Suite," and get a marketing campaign geared towards 14 year olds, then you'll be raking in the dough
...I am proof that intelligent beings are not always intelligent...
I need to sit down.
--hongpong.com