meChair

Inspiration:

Back pain experienced by the me and other software developers at my previous workplace. And this article - http://crunchedd.com/sitting-is-killing-lack-of-exercise-as-harmful-as-smoking/

How it works:

meChair is an intelligent chair, that is connected to the internet. It has pressure sensors embedded on the seat and the back of the chair that tracks the sitting posture of the user. Based on the activation of sensors, we give a daily, monthly and weekly scores to the user that tells them how good/bad they are doing.

meChair also tracks the time the user has been sitting. If the time elasped reaches threshold of 2 hours, a notification is sent to the user along with the score to his/her phone as a reminder to take break.

Challenges we ran into:

1. We could'nt find pressure sensors in the hackathon. We had to improvise our design and use the light sensors.
2. Real-time updating of values happened after a delay of 10 seconds.
3. It was hard to synchronize connect2.me servers and our local http server.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

Successfully tracked the sitting posture of the user with little delay and sent notifications successfully during the demo

What I learned:

Arduino Programming with Wifi MQTT protocol

What's next for meChair?

1. Identify the user sitting on meChair.
2. Automatic height adjustment based on user sitting on meChair.
3. Biometric reader on handles to record attendance.
4. Effective timesheet tracking

Built With

• android
• arduino
• node.js
• particle
• twilio