Wearable Smart Health Advisors: An IMU-Enabled Posture Monitor

Unhealthy life habits are associated with a large number of chronic conditions in our modern lifestyle. Many commercialized wearable solutions have already been developed for monitoring and prevention purposes, while recent design efforts aim for more user-friendly and reliable solutions. In this context, due to the increased periods of sitting at work or home, improper sitting posture is related to numerous health disorders of the musculoskeletal system. Therefore, continuous stance monitoring can be used to improve users' sitting habits. In this article, we present an overview of wearable self-care devices and describe a monitoring system for a sitting posture that utilizes wireless motion sensors attached to the user's back. The developed prototype relies on inertial measurement units able to track the angle deviation from the optimal position which is learned during a training phase. Additionally, in order to support stance visualization and track the user's performance over time, our framework utilizes a cloud-native mobile application. The proposed system is experimentally evaluated resulting in an accurate everyday solution that prevents chronic improper posture.