Finding the Right Way for Interrupting People Improving Their Sitting Posture

Abstract

Abstract. In this paper, we present three different ways of interrupting people to posture guidance. We developed an ergonomically adjustable office chair equipped with four sensors measuring the office worker's posture. It is important that users do some training after bad posture and be alerted of this; therefore, we implemented three different alert modalities (Graphical Feedback, Physical Feedback, and Vibrotactile Feedback), with the goal to find out which of the techniques is the most effective interruption modality without causing a huge disruption effect. To measure the task-performance, we conducted a formal user study. Our user study results show there are different effects on performance and disruptiveness caused by the three interruption techniques. While the vibrotactile feedback might have higher information awareness benefits at the beginning, it causes a huge intrusion side-effect. Thus, the physical feedback was rated less disruptive to the workflow as the other two feedback modalities.

Exploring the Potential of Physical Visualizations

“…The sensordriven sculpture uses data from a people's chair to suggest when it is time to take a break by encoding it into its shape and movement (see Figure 4.18-center). Similar projects used physical avatars in form of a puppet [Daian et al, 2007], a flower [Haller et al, 2011;Hong et al, 2015] or encoded data into the transparency of a lamp shape [Cha et al, 2016]. The first project that looked into the role of physically dynamic data representations for the exploration and analysis of datasets was EMERGE [Taher et al, 2015]: an interactive bar chart, equipped with plastic rods, RGB Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs), a Microsoft Kinect® and a projector supported fundamental data representation tasks such as filtering or sorting (see Figure 4.18-right).…”

Measuring the Effectiveness of User Interventions in Improving the Seated Posture of Computer Users

“…Research has been carried out on how best to interrupt a user from their everyday office work in order to inform them of their poor posture, and to do so with the smallest impact to their workflow and productivity [7]. The three options that were proposed were graphical feedback, physical feedback and haptic feedback.…”

Recognizing Static and Dynamic Sitting Behavior by Means of Instrumented Office Chairs

“…The work presented herein is part of a broader research activity with the aim to develop and evaluate a novel office environment called "Active Office". This novel office environment is going to combine a standing desk, a sitting desk with an active chair as well as different human-computer-interface (HCI) concepts [14], [15] and hence provides opportunities for office workers to seamlessly change between different work environments. As a result the "Active Office" is going to support people to carry out physically active work processes in a more natural way which in turn allows to prevent health problems associated with workplace induced inactivity [2].…”

“…For the user study we stated two goals a) to investigate with which feedback modality a user should be interrupted in case of an unhealthy sitting condition, and b) to learn about the sitting behavior of different participants on different chairs (common office chair vs. active chair). The analysis of three different feedback modalities i) graphical feedback, ii) physical feedback by means of an physical avatar as well as iii) vibro-tactile feedback is provided in [14] and is beyond the scope of this paper. Herein we will concentrate on the analysis of the different sitting behavior with respect to static and dynamic sitting depending on day-time and office chair.…”