Smartphone posture monitoring system to prevent unhealthy neck postures

A rapid growth of smartphone devices in consumer market is undeniable. However, this growth definitely comes with causes. In terms of health, it has changed consumers´ daily life behavior, as people tend to use more smartphones, and some of them are considered as smartphone addicted. With people using smartphones in longer period, this could easily become unhealthy for them. The neck pain is one of the syndromes caused by the prolonged use of the smartphones, as bad neck posture would mean more weight is seen by the spine. To prevent and promote better neck posture for smartphone users, we propose a system to monitor, alert, and summarize the neck angle of the user while using smartphone. The proposed system will monitor user´s neck angle based on the combination of smartphone sensors and image detection technique. Moreover, the system will provide alert to the user if the position is in an unhealthy one for a certain period, and also will provide the user with a summarization of the time period. The experiment results of our proof of concept also had shown that our algorithm was feasible. An average neck angle determination in each setting was still within 5 degrees of the actual neck angle and the standard deviation is lower than 4 degrees in all cases.