Flexible force sensors embedded in office chair for monitoring of sitting postures

Six flexible force sensors, two on the backrest and four on the seat, were embedded in the upholstery of an off-the-shelf office chair to enable non-intrusive monitoring of sitting postures. Besides the sensors, the monitoring platform comprises an Arduino Nano microcontroller with Wi-Fi transmitter, embedded on the chair, a Wi-Fi receiver communicating with a remote server and a Graphical User Interface (GUI) showing real-time readings. Approximately 26,000 observations corresponding to 9 different postures were collected, labelled and classified using supervised machine learning. The results show that only a subset of the 6 sensors is needed for predicting these 9 sitting postures with high accuracy. This opens up the possibility for intelligent, real-time monitoring systems that can improve safety and wellbeing of today’s office workers