Developing a Mobile Application to Detect Improper Sitting Using Regression Analysis and an Accelerometer

Sitting improperly can impact on the amount of pressure put on the back of the body, causing the spine to degrade prematurely. Therefore, this paper proposed a method of computing sitting angles and the creation of a mobile application to alert users when they are sitting improperly. First, a digital protractor and an accelerometer-equipped with a smartphone were employed to gather data. Next, regression equations derived from the collected data were applied to compute the angles between the upper and lower body as well as the angles on the left and right sides of the upper body while sitting. The computed angles were used to analyze the sitting posture. To expedite the testing process, an Android Sensor Fusion application was used to stream the accelerometer data over a local network through a router to a PC-based program. Finally, a mobile application was created. The results showed that the proposed method could be used to obtain sitting angles and alert users when they were sitting improperly.