Smart Cushion-Based Activity Recognition: Prompting Users to Maintain a Healthy Seated Posture

In the emerging wearable world, a plethora of smart devices are being designed to facilitate our daily life. More activities, such as student learning, desk office work, or driving are requiring human beings to spend a significant portion of their daily life sitting on a chair. As a result, there is increasing interest in the development of technologies that monitor and support seated users. The most iconic examples of this are the smart chair and the smart cushion. To prompt users to maintain healthy sitting posture and to encourage them to have a short break after prolonged sitting, several studies focus on the detection, monitoring, and analysis of sitting postures. The smart cushion, in particular, is a very promising device in this context because it is noninvasive and can be conveniently deployed on the seat or backrest, making an ordinary chair, sofa, or even a car seat suddenly smart. This article reviews our previous research studies and the results related to sitting posture recognition using the smart cushion. We will show that very diversified applications can be enabled, spanning medical applications (e.g., back pain or pressure ulcers avoidance) and even human communication (body language detection).