Over 86% of office workers have experienced strain or soreness due to their desk setup or posture, resulting in injuries and illnesses that account for around 34% of lost workdays. For companies, this costs around 45 to 54 billion dollars of lost compensation, wages, and productivity every year.

Good ergonomic practices, especially proper sitting posture and desk setup, can prevent these musculoskeletal injuries. Is it possible that technology could help people gain better ergonomic practices by giving them real-time feedback on the healthiness of their posture?

Our concept is Swivel, a connected office chair that uses weight sensors in the seat and back. With these sensors, the chair can determine when it is occupied, know who is occupying it, and give the occupant real-time feedback on their posture.

We conceptualized Swivel as a solution not only for helping to improve employees’ health and productivity in the workplace, but also as a source of security and data for employers. Employers could use swivel as an extra authentication step for proprietary information and use data from Swivel to better understand how employees utilize the office space, helping them to make better decisions about office layout.

We were given five technologies to explore: a camera ID with sensor, a connected scale, an inventory bag, micro location, and mixed reality. We started by rapidly generating ideas individually and then came together as a team to discuss the pros and cons of these ideas.

After brainstorming, we considered the tradeoffs of each idea and focused on ones that we thought had the most potential. We eventually narrowed down to two ideas: an inventory-sensing medical kit and a weight-sensing office chair. We selected the office chair because we thought it had wider potential applications and a richer set of data.

We identified businesses, particularly tech companies, as an ideal target customer for the weight sensing chair because they already invest heavily in ergonomic solutions for their employees.

As we were conducting our research around ergonomics in the workplace, we encountered several products aimed towards addressing both the concerns of poor posture and infrequent breaks from sitting.

The major breakdown with these current devices is that they are not always accurate or convenient to use. Because Swivel is embedded in the chair, it can more accurately tell whether it is occupied or not without requiring its occupant to remember any additional devices.

Another opportunity to make the connected chair stand more valuable than its competition is the potential for data. If all of the chairs in an office are able to track when they were occupied, this could allow companies to get a clear picture of how employees utilize their office space. This is increasingly important for companies as they must make decisions about how to restructure office spaces or identify areas they can repurpose or eliminated.

In addition to providing information on space utilization, we also realized that the chair had potential security applications as well. If it could learn who was sitting on it, it could load up an occupant’s personal desktop as soon as they sit down. Additionally, the chair could lock the computer screen after becoming unoccupied, which would reduce the security risk of unattended workstations.

Bo Kim and Shannon Sullivan