Monitoring Neck Posture with Flex Sensors

Abstract

Poor neck postures often lead to neck pains which can take a serious toll on people’s health over time. This paper proposes a mobile neck posture monitoring system with flex sensors, two flex sensors are attached to the neck, a BLE soc chip will process all data and send to PC or cellphone. When the neck posture of a user is poor, this system will automatically provides warning to this user for better neck health. To simplify experiments, the bad posture is defined as the skull curvature greater than 30. The experimental results showed that the classification result of the system reaches 100% accuracy. Comparing systems based with MEMS sensors including accelerometers, the proposed system avoid wrong skull curvature results caused by the fact that the human body does not coincide with the line of gravity. This study demonstrates strong enough evidences to merit further investigation.