Ergonomics is gaining importance as the usage of computers skyrockets. A report once read that 80% of Americans face a back problem at some time or the other of their life, thus spending billions on just backache. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University (Israel) have developed an intelligent ergonomics tool that measures your posture from webcam input and gives you warnings. Having suffered from poor ergonomics and heavy computing, its always been a priority for me and I am happy to see such research happening.
The researchers have done some geeky analysis of human posture and determined a scale of 1 (good) – 7 (poor) posture, which is sensed from 12 input points plotted on the sample image below. This same feed going in from your web camera to the software helps throw some real-time warnings and thus help you improve your posture.
The system sure isn’t ready to go mainstream immediately, but if notebooks / PCs along with an operating system that integrates ergonomics mode integrated can become a reality, this can do extremely good to computerkind. For now, we hope enterprises see the value in such systems, remember health is wealth:)
You can download the presentation detailing the research here.
