The Posture Suspenders senses posture in real-time and via vibration alerts the user to bad posture. Thereby the user develops muscle memory for correct posture.

Slouching:
Slouching not only makes you look bad it also causes long-term damage to your health. A bad posture can result in back pains, tension headaches, and spinal musculoskeletal disorders. Bad posture often occurs because the muscles surrounding the spine can’t support the weight of the upper body, which results in a poor posture and the above mentioned “side effects”.

One-half of all working Americans have back pain symptoms each year and in total Americans spend more than $50 billion each year on back pains. But bad posture does not only leed to invisible pains. For twenty-five percent of women above 50, bad posture has resulted in a loss of height and increased kyphosis (round back).

The existing products:

Most of the devices that are available today use accelerometers to determine if the user is slouching . The first prototypes of the Posture Suspenders I developed also used multiply accelerometers, but I found that the noise from the accelerometers was to high and that they were very sensitive to changes in body position (They often needed to be re-calibrated everytime you move just a little).

One of the most popular devices on the market today is the iPosture device. iPosture uses a single accelerometer to tell if the user deviates more than a certain thresholds from a user-set position. But the users have to re-calibrate it every time the they change position ( push a button to tell the device “this is the correct position for me now”).

The big difference between The Posture Suspenders and products similar to iPosture is, that the users don’t have to recalibrate The Posture Suspenders every time they change position making it more likely that the user actually will improve his or her posture.

The Posture Suspenders

A pair of normal suspenders from Amazon is the base of The Posture Suspenders. A piece of stretchable conductive fabric have been added to the suspenders and a vibrator is providing feedback to the user.

The conductive fabric changes its resistance based on the stretch of the fabric, which is used to determine the users posture. The conductive fabric will be lose (low resistance) when the user is slouching and visa vasa and when the user has a correct posture.

An Arduino Pro Mini is sewed onto the suspenders, where the fabric-sensor, the vibrator and a XeBee wireless radio all are connected. A 3.6 volts battery is powering all the electronics. (The XeBee, should not be in the final version of The Posture Suspender, it is only in this prototype to visualize the posture in real time).

Press for The Posture Suspenders:

http://blog.makezine.com/ (English)

http://www.fashioningtech.com/ (English)

http://www.designtaxi.com/ (English)

http://www.theverge.com/ (English)

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/01/electronic-susp.php (English)

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/posture-suspenders (English)

http://www.techewire.com/2012/01/electronic-suspenders-enough-said/ (English)

http://www.craziestgadgets.com/ (English)

http://www.thefabweb.com/ (English)

http://www.nextgadgets.net/ (English)

http://www.athenna.com/ (English)

http://www.inewidea.com/ (English)

http://www.toppli.com (English)

http://www.fayerwayer.com/2012/01/un-estudiante-danes-crea-un-dispositivo-que-nos-cuidaria-la-espalda/ (Spanish)

http://www.rsstecnologia.com/estudiante-danes-crea-un-dispositivo-que-previene-la-mala-postura/ (Spanish)

http://cerebrodigital.org/estudiante-danes-crea-un-dispositivo-que-previene-la-mala-postura/ (Spanish)

http://www.entusdias.com/ (Spanish)

http://www.novate.ru/ (Russian)

http://dailynewsagency.com/ (Japanese)

http://nlab.itmedia.co.jp (Japanese)

http://dailygizmo.tv/ (Thai)

http://revistapegn.globo.com/Revista/Common/0,,EMI290655-17180,00-ESTUDANTE+CRIA+SUSPENSORIOS+QUE+MELHORAM+A+POSTURA.html (Portuguese)

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(28 Photos)

Break-O-Meter is a small device that can sense your presence, and notifies you when it is time for you to take a break.

My inspiration for this idea came after having read Stephen R. Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®, and the follow qoute from the book:

Suppose you were to come upon someone in the woods working feverishly to saw down a tree.

“What are you doing?” you ask.

“Can’t you see?” comes the impatient reply. “I’m sawing down this tree.”

“You look exhausted!” you exclaim. “How long have you been at it?”

“Over five hours,” he returns, “and I’m beat! This is hard work.”

‘Well, why don’t you take a break for a few minutes and sharpen that saw?” you inquire. “I’m sure it would go a lot faster.”

“I don’t have time to sharpen the saw,” the man says emphatically. “I’m too busy sawing!”

The Break-O-Meter reminds and helps you to sharpen your saw so that you can be productive and healthy.

The body of the Break-O-Meter is modelled and printed in 3. The frontpanel is lasercut. On the inside it contains three BlinkMs, one stepper motor, one IR-sensor witch is connected to an Arduino Uno (optionally I could replace the Uno with an Arduino Mini Pro that would fit inside the stand).

In a world where the Facebook inspired ‘like’ has become an integrated part of our language and where people all around the world pushes the like’-button on Barak Obama’s, Pepsi’s or even Britney Spears’ Facebook page, I thought it could be interesting to visualize these virtual likes in a physical form.

The Motorized Facebook Thumb can be set up to listen to any Facebook-page. It reacts in real-time to new likes by rising its thumb and turning on blue LEDs.

The process of making the Motorized Facebook Thumb started in Rhino (a 3D software application) where all the parts have been modeled in 3D. After having build a complete 3D model (including gears) of the Motorized Facebook Thumb , the parts where laser cut, and lastly they were put together.

The inside of the Motorized Facebook Thumb consist of an Arduino Mini Pro, two homemade blue diffused-LEDs, a stepper moter, and a Xbee(ZigBee) device that enables the Motorized Facebook Thumb to wireless send and receive data.

The Motorized Facebook Thumb is connected to a computer (with an internet connection), where a small JAVA application has been build to listen for likes on a specific Facebook page. Everytime a facebook user ‘likes’ the pages the JAVA programme are observing, the JAVA programme notifies the Motorized Facebook Thumb that someone somewhere in the world liked i.e. Carnegie Mellon University, and the Motorized Facebook Thumb then raised it thumb and lights up for a few seconds, before dimming out ant waiting for the next like

I have also made a version with the Arduino Ethernet shield, which makes it possible to connect the Motorized Facebook Thumb directly to the internet without the need for a computer.

The stand is modeled in Rhino and milled in plywood.

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(12 Photos)

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RHoK (www.rhok.org) is an initiative that brings together software developers and subject matter experts for intensive weekends of programming to address global challenges. RHoK was founded in partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank. The partner organizations have engaged SecondMuse as the Global Operational Lead of the initiative to execute their vision and coordinate the global logistics of RHoK. As such, I have the opportunity to work closely with the RHoK leads in each participating country. It is in that capacity that I had an opportunity to work with Tobias.

For the first event my team and I created a stop-motion movie to promote RHoK and RHoK Aarhus, which later became featured on the international RHoK homepage:

RHoK post-it movie : Aarhus, Denmark from Tobias Sonne on Vimeo.

Often the biggest drawback with augmented reality installations and programs is that you need a camera and a see-through-display to experience them. With AR Tower Defence our goal was to create a richer user experience that did not forced the user to use special hardware to play the game.

The gameplay builds on the classical version of TowerDefence, but in AR Tower Defence the users have the ability to builds their own special towers in LEGO®. Each tower have different properties (firing speed, precession, damage) depending on which LEGO®-bricks is being used to build them. The system recognizes the towers based on a QR Code placed on top of the tower – which our system is printing out for the users based on which bricks they have used to build their tower.

The working prototype is using FLARToolKit which is an AS3 port of ARToolKit to recognize and keep track of the position of the LEGO® towers.

ARTowerDefense from Tobias Sonne on Vimeo.

Morten is testing the setup

Matthias is adjusting the projector

The focus for this project was to engage kids and teenagers, most of them with a immigrant backgronud, in the library and make the library a good place to hang out, have fun and meet other young people.

Through a participatory design process, with a heavy focus on experience prototyping and bodystorming, we decided to go with the Social Shadows idea. The final installation was installed at Hasle Library for nearly two weeks as a pilot project, and recieved so great feedback from both the staff and the teenagers that they asked to keep the the installation.

Social Shadows was also featured at ‘Forskningens Døgn’ 2010 at Aarhus University (a showcase day to display some of the research conducted at the university).

Social Shadows from Tobias Sonne on Vimeo.

Tobias interviewing kids at Hasle Library

Bodystorming at Hasle Library

Setting up the Social Shadows installation at Hasle Library

Kids palaying Social Shadows at Hasle Library

Adults and children playing at Forsknings Døgn 2010

Some found a way to beat the game : - )

Game frontend

Teenagers playing Social Shadows at Forskningens Døgn 2010