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Final Project

To graduate Fab Academy we need to complete the 8 weeks of training and also produce a final project.
The project must have some form of connected devices, meaning they must be integrated into IoT, and they must relate to 4 topics that FabLab is currently interested in:

  1. Sustainable Homes

  2. Education

  3. Healthcare

  4. Interactive Play

I was interested in the Healthcare sector, so I teamed up with a group to create A Smart Medication Dispenser. Details can be found here.

My lovely group mates were Saeed Makhlooq, Hassan Mandeel, and Sara Hamza.

Before we teamed up we each had an idea in mind, mine was:

Project Ideas

Posture Check Office Chair

My idea is that an office chair is to have some force sensors built into it at certain positions in order to detect the weight distribution of the person sitting on it, and based on this data identify if the person is not sitting with correct posture. This can greatly the healthcare sector by combating the increasing prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders due to the increase in office based jobs.
Keywords: Posture Detection, human action recognition, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), preventive healthcare

The IoT aspect of the project can be implemented to facilitate communication between the posture detection method, and the method of notifying the person to fix their posture. Additionally, IoT can be used to identify the amount of time a person spends working on a computer to allow for more targeted prevention. Furthermore, IoT can allow for advanced data analysis methods to identify patterns and make more impactful decisions.

After doing some research into similar ideas, I found that the concept of posture detection was tackled in 4 main methods:

  1. Use of camera input system to make a 3d representation of the person. This typically was done using Microsoft’s Kinect device. However, this was also commonly used with some form of AI, which may be difficult to implement.
    Keywords: Microsoft Kinect, skeleton-based human representation, 3D Joint Space, RGB-D

  2. Use of force sensors place in the chair. This method may need more research as I did not find many articles with a lot of citations.
    Keywords: force sensing resistors (FSR)

  3. Use of RFID tags attached to the user. These tags are light-weight and cheap and have been used to recognize seating patterns.
    Keywords: RFID

  4. Use of wearable sensors. May be uncomfortable for the user.
    Keywords: Wearable Sensors, accelerometers

Last update: October 10, 2024