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.

Comments

Ergonomics for YOU dummies!

[swordgeek]

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.

Will it provide automatic support for me if I.....

[i-Chaos]

... 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?
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 /me's like "/me is stroking your back." :)
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 :)