A Deep Learning–Based Chair System That Detects Sitting Posture

Long-term poor sitting posture leads to physical injuries such as muscle soreness and waist and neck alignment problems. In this study, we proposed an intelligent sitting posture detection system that uses depth cameras fixed on a chair to capture depth images of the user's sitting posture, and then applies a trained artificial intelligence (AI) model on an embedded Raspberry Pi board to recognize the user's sitting posture from the image data. Finally, through Bluetooth on the Raspberry Pi, the results are sent to the user's smartphone application for display and recording to achieve rapid detection of sitting posture and warning of poor sitting posture. The contribution of this study is its use of two depth cameras mounted on a chair, thereby eliminating the problem of cumbersome sensors that compromise user comfort or are prone to damage. The detection of the user's entire sitting posture was completed on an edge computing platform, which leads to power savings and offers privacy protection. Furthermore, because of the low battery power usage, the system is portable. To perform quick AI calculations, we developed a lightweight EfficientNet model and programmed it for the Raspberry Pi. The system achieved an accuracy of 99.71% and an execution speed of almost one posture result per second.