A project designed to help people improve their postural hygiene and health

We first focussed our research on the chair as we had some questions regarding implementation:
How are we going to detect the user's posture? Are pressure sensors accurate enough to detect slight position changes? How will the chair send the collected data to the DB? How will the chair connect to a specific user?…

We came to the following conclusions:

• To detect the user position, we will use pressure sensors placed in the chair seat and backrest.
  These sensors will be connected to a wi-fi module to send the collected data to the DB.
• To give the chair access to the internet, we will have to implement a previous connection protocol with the user’s phone. We decided to go with a Bluetooth module integrated in the chair and a button in one of the armrests to enable pairing mode.
  
• Since we want to avoid the users being distracted by notifications in their phones, we decided to also add vibration modules to the chair seat and backrest to notify the user through short vibrations, and a second button next to the Bluetooth one, to snooze those notifications if needed.

Regarding the app, we wanted it not only to serve the purpose of showing notifications and current posture status, but also give the user the opportunity to customize their experience by adjusting notification times and vibration patterns, watch educational materials on postural hygiene, and keep track of the progress made over time.

Once we had our MVP defined, we made some Low-fidelity prototypes and had a round of user testing. From those sessions we were able to collect valuable insights that we then applied to improve our design.

Having our first prototype completed and improved, we were in conditions to start thinking about UI design.
We wanted a modern looking app, easy to the eye, intuitive and most importantly low-vision friendly. So we went for a dark themed clean interface with minimal icons and illustrations, high contrast and basic colors (green = good, red = bad) to make the learning process easier.
We chose a casual and friendly tone to communicate with our users, since we don’t want to be adding pressure to their journey.

At this point we still didn’t have a name picked, so we started writing down some options. It had to be something simple, to the point, minimal, it had to be… POSTURE.

We put all together into High-fidelity wireframes, made a few iterations, and were ready to start the High-fidelity prototype.
Setting the UI motion at the right time and place not only helped the interactions to be more smooth, but also provided context, feedback and visibility of the system status. We kept it simple, as we did in the previous steps.

This is a product we've imagined for a long time, and a while back we decided to start building it one step at a time.
It is the result of our expertise and passion for UX Design, Mobile and IoT combined.
There's nothing like POSTURE available in the market right now, and we feel there is a huge need for products that help people improve their postural hygiene, more so in times where lots of people work from home and spend lots of hours a day sitting on their desks.

Visit POSTURE clickable prototype here.