Instrumented Office Chair With Low-Cost Plastic Optical Fiber Sensors for Posture Control and Work Conditions Optimization

People spend more and more time sitting and this habit has been shown to cause spine pathologies. Thus, the scientific community and the industry have become interested in instrumented chairs development to detect incorrect user postures. In this work we present the development and implementation of invisibles and non-intrusive plastic optical fiber sensor cells to monitor the posture and evaluate the ergonomic behavior of a seated person. The low-cost plastic optical fiber (POF) based sensing devices developed in this work, were implemented in an office chair, to evaluate the workers posture throughout their work day. In addition to the sensors, Android and PC software applications were developed, to provide real time feedback and alerts to the user whenever an inadequate posture is detected, or the seating position is the same for a long time. The proposed approach was evaluated in a study involving six users, and results show that it can detect the user’s position with 96.6% accuracy.