Smart chair for monitoring of sitting behavior

Sitting is a common behavior of human body in daily life. It is found that poor sitting postures can link to pains and other complications for people in literature. In order to avoid the adverse effects of poor sitting behavior, we have developed a highly practical design of smart chair system in this paper, which is able to monitor the sitting behavior of human body accurately and non-invasively. The pressure patterns of eight standardized sitting postures of human subjects were acquired and transmitted to the computer for the automatic sitting posture recognition with the application of artificial neural network classifier. The experimental results showed that it can recognize eight sitting postures of human subjects with high accuracy. The sitting posture monitoring in the developed smart chair system can help or promote people to achieve and maintain healthy sitting behavior, and prevent or reduce the chronic disease caused by poor sitting behavior. These promising results suggested that the presented system is feasible for sitting behavior monitoring, which can find applications in many areas including healthcare services, human-computer interactions and intelligent environment.