bad posture so that they can timely improve their
poor posture and maintain good posture while
sitting. A collaborative, social-networked approach
is used and three technologies of real-time posture
monitoring, biofeedback, and collaborative social
networks are adopted, which consists of an
embedded-system-based posture monitoring headset,
a handheld device, a social-network App, and cloud
services. The proposed framework is tested with a
group of six middle-school best-friend teens for ten
days. Three scenarios are designed to validate the
effectiveness of the proposed approach and tools.
Experiment results show that the proposed
framework and the developed posture training tools
are very effective in increasing teens’ good posture
percentage of time. Social support and peer
influences are important and effective to encourage
the peers in maintaining good posture and being
willing to spend longer time in wearing the tool.
There are some mHealth apps, like iOS Health
and Google Fit, and mobile wearable fitness devices
available on the market. Only few of them have
social networks or social media functions. There
still needs an integrated social network platform to
accommodate the bio-sensing functions for heart
beats, EKG (electrocardiogram), blood glucose, and
so on, as an integrated health service. Future
research may consider the posture training of lower
backs where disorders of the lumbar spinal and its
surrounding muscle, nerves, bones, discs or tendons
usually cause severe lower back pains due to poor
posture.
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