FPGA-based smart chair recognition system using flex sensors

Sitting is the most common status of modern human beings. Many people are sitting with bad posture which may lead to postural pain. Especially for people with short term-disabilities, sitting in the right posture is very important. In this research, we propose a posture recognition system on an office chair that can categorize different health-related sitting postures to prevent harm from bad sitting postures. The smart chair system consists of an array of five flex sensors integrated into a FPGA board. The output of the system is the classification result of the sitting posture. In this paper, several health-related sitting postures are selected. The sitting postures are: 1-sit straight; 2-left recline; 3-right recline; 4-lounge;5-lean backward; 6-cross left leg; 7-cross right leg. The proposed reconfigurable framework will be integrated as part of smart ambient assisted living with user-centered health monitoring system.