A revolutionary chair that does much more than just revolving!

Published in

Carbon 60

4 min readMar 7, 2016

Pondering thought

About a week ago, after much delay, I had to visit the chemist store to buy Iodex. No, not Zandu Balm, Iodex. Have heard stories about people applying it and eating it with bread to get a supreme level of getting high, but that was not my use case here. To blend with the rest of the world, I started having major back aches. I do Yoga every morning, at least that’s what I tell myself. So the back problem, apart from being hereditary, could arise from improper posture. That’s when I started cursing the chairs at my office. That’s when it dawned upon me, something that I had been pondering over since a while now. It has been at least ten thousand years that humans as a collective race, have been trying to better design chairs. And still we go to a café and keep searching for ‘better chairs’! Something more comfortable, something more appealing. Something that doesn’t make fart sounds when we move, something that doesn’t rock when it is not supposed to. Which clearly says that we haven’t perfected that art of chair design, and are still far from it.

It is a well-known fact that 8 out of 10 people have back ache issues sooner than expected. Technology has reached a level that it can very well support us, literally and metaphorically. So why do we not make a chair which knows that sitting for prolonged periods is bad for our health. That would maybe adapt to our personal liking. A chair that would prompt you to exercise, prompt you to take a break if you are sitting for prolonged periods of time. A chair that you call yours. A chair that is smart. A chair that does a lot more than just revolving. It’s a revolutionary chair.

Concept Evolution

So after conducting precedence studies and research, we did not find a product that we liked, and the researches that we did found, were highly digressing. So we decided to take the matters of our back into our own hands and come up with prototypes over the coming weeks.

What

A chair that detects if a person is sitting. It times the seating time.

Why

Research shows that even if you exercise, sitting for 6+ hours a day makes it 40% likelier to trigger chronic back problems.

Where

The concept would presently target offices or places of large seating for prolonged periods of time, and later expand to possibly every chair.

Whom

The concept would benefit the individual users immensely.

How

The approach is to interface a cloud data collection with a retrofitted chair module. This hardware and software interaction could be scalable.

Redefine Concept

A chair that detects presence and times the presence and give feedback for extended sitting times.

Iterations and Prototypes

The aim of prototyping in the first week is to retrofit a chair with some form of a sensor that detects presence. The presence thus recorded is sent to the cloud, and a timer is started. While this, the retrofit module displays its occupancy status as occupied or vacant through lights. A graph is generated on the cloud based algorithm which collates this data in a representative format. As soon as a stipulated time is reached, the cloud sends a trigger for initiating feedback mechanism.

The hardware comprises of microcontrollers such as Arduino and NodeMCU, Wi-Fi modules paired to them, Light emitting diodes for notification purposes, vibration motors for feedback, wires for connections, buttons for sensing and actuating, and a chair to fit it all in, and a cloud, no not the one in the sky.