Heenan, suffered from some posture related health issues and this gave him the idea to develop Posture.io which is a smart posture tracking and alerting system. During day time, Heenan works for Segovia, a NY based start up digital platform for NGO to reach the poor people. As per the report from Techcrunch: The Posture.io hack sports a Texas Instruments Bluetooth Low Energy sensor (which would cost around $20 to $30); this sensor is attached to the back of an office chair with velcro. In addition there is an adhesive magnetic rubber strip which would cost around $1 -$2 and this is attached to the back of the wearer’s belt. Now, the distance and the angle of the magnetic strip on the wearer’s belt is detected by the TI sensors and using this information it will calculate if the wearer is slouching or is in his correct posture. Further, the app also maintains a record of this data and then the data is used to monitor the wearer throughout the day which encourages wearer to prevent slouching and maintain a proper posture. Heenan said: “I look at the sum of square distances between different magnetometer positions. So basically your belt is a magnet and the sensor tag measures magnetic fields. And when you lean over, or you slouch, you’re basically increasing the distance to the magnet. I can tell the angle as well.” Heenan says that wearer should always aim to maintain their posture score close to 100. The most important point about this new low cost hardware hack is that it is “unobtrusive” so it records data for entire day and also does not disturb the wearer during their work. Another feature of this smart low cost hack is that it uses the Leap Motion gesture controller to track the gestures of their hand wherein the users are directed to perform atypical hand exercises that are designed to relieve the damaging repetition of typing. Posture.io takes one step forward by pushing notifications to the Pebble smartwatch which acts as reminder to user to maintain their posture. Suppose, if the score is too bad then it is even capable of generating an Outlook calendar reminder so that user can perform micro exercise and help themselves from the problems arising from the bad posture. So, Posture.io not only can turn any belt and office chair into an non obstrusive low cost posture improvement hack to prevent slouching at office desk but it also supports users with smart posture notifications and hand exercises that is tracked by its Leap Motion.
