PosturePower

Inspiration

In our school, there is a popular STEM science program called Annenberg Science Symposium. Every year, the team points out a common, everyday health phenomenon that needs to be addressed. For example, a past topic was sleep deprivation. For this hackathon our team decided to take the stance of Annenberg Science Symposium, and not just pinpoint the problem, but also help rectify the problem, of bad posture. We considered making a chair-like device to help detect bad posture, but posture matters all the time, not just while sitting; there are a host of health problems that could occur (gastrointestinal problems, back pain, neck/shoulder pain, depression, stress, all which could negatively affect one's career and lifestyle) a result of consistent bad posture, something very common in today's world, with more sedentary jobs as ever. We figured a clothing addition would be more effective.

What it does

The sensor, placed on your back, would detect your angle of sitting (80 degrees +/- 10 is defined as good, otherwise poor) and gently alert you with the LED light being lit up to fix your posture.

How we built it

PosturePower utilizes the gyroscopic functions of Adafruit's 9 degrees of freedom sensor to measure the angle of the middle of the person's spine. If it is deemed that the angle is not within the healthy range, the LED light will turn on.

Challenges we ran into

Figuring out the sensor's API was difficult, as we had to disable the RPi's serial port function so we could use it to connect to the sensor. Additionally, we had issues dealing with SD card corruption, leading us to have register write errors until we copied over the code to a new SD card.

What we learned

• I learned how to work with APIs (we used the Adafruit 9 degrees of freedom sensor)

What's next for PosturePower

• smaller size hardware
• vibrator, not LED light
• wireless, easy to use with any type of clothing
• barely noticeable

Built With

• python
• raspberry-pi