Designing a Smart Shirt to Support Adolescents’ Sitting Posture Based on Strain Textile Sensors

Abstract

Due to the schoolwork and long-time electronic devices use, teenagers have longer time in sedentary behavior and their good postures are continuously attracting attentions. Wearable technology based on IMUs or computer vision technology based on cameras have been widely explored. Smart textile sensing technology which has great potential in body postures monitoring is one of the fields that has developed rapidly in recent years. This article focuses on teenagers’ sitting posture, following the approach of research through design, we identified the problems and challenges, tested multiple textile samples, performed the locations analysis, and finally proposed a smart shirt integrated with six stretchable textile strain sensors. The resistance of each textile sensor will change linearly through the length change. Together with the classification model in MatLab, the smart shirt can distinguish inappropriate postures with an accuracy rate of 99.1%. We also proposed a feedback design and performed a wizard-of-oz field study to see how the smart shirt may help the teenagers to maintain good postures and how do the participants value the usability. The results demonstrated the system can help the participants facilitate maintaining good postures heir posture in sedentary work.