Participants
Bachelor Project Students: Husin Alfil, GianLuca Ehses, Tyron Franzke, Simon Immelmann, Viktor Kalvoda, Nicolas Loeser, Josef Pribbernow, Nikolas Rieger, Tebbe Ubben, Nils Urban and Thomas Wolf
Supervisors: Orhan Konak, Holly McKee
Smartjacket Prototype Design
Project Description
Prolonged sitting and static postures are major contributors to musculoskeletal discomfort, yet existing digital aids often lack accuracy or cause notification fatigue. We present Back in Focus, a smart clothing system that continuously monitors spinal posture and provides subtle vibrotactile feedback to encourage healthy postural changes. Our prototype integrates six IMU sensors into a textile jacket, paired with a mobile app that visualizes back posture in real time. We iteratively developed and evaluated two hardware versions, reducing sensor dropout by over 80% and improving usability scores (SUS 74.6). Machine learning models (MLP, LSTM) trained on data from 33 participants classified ten upper-body postures with >94% accuracy. A pilot user study demonstrated the feasibility of vibration cues for promoting postural variability without interrupting work. This work highlights the potential of smart garments to support everyday ergonomics and paves the way for applications in digital health and rehabilitation.
Publications
- Viktor Emil Kalvoda, Josef Pribbernow, Nikolas Rieger, and Thomas Mathias Wolf. 2026. BackinFocus: Iterative Design and Validation of a Smart Jacket for Robust Posture Sensing. In Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799182 [Pre-Print]