A sensing cushion using simple pressure distribution sensors

It has been promising to provide personalized services for improving our living environment in support of information technologies. Sitting is one of the frequent actions in our daily life, especially for people who work in office. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a sensing cushion. The cushion's information about seated postures can be used to help avoid adverse effects of sitting for long periods of time or to predict seated activities for a human-computer interface. The cushion's seat pan and backrest surface is mounted with simple binary valued pressure distribution sensors. The pressure distribution data is scanned by a micro controller unit and then transited to a personal computer by a Bluetooth module. The recognition task is performed on the PC side, which can recognize 9 different seated postures in real time with high accuracy.