CONNECT
Issue 16
Do your employees or coworkers ever slump or slouch at their desks, even though they attended classes on how to sit better, stand in balance or you bought them the perfect chair and desk? Or how about the employees that sit at their kitchen table or sofa at home? Nudging into better behavior or computer vision and posture?
Nudges – user interface How do you alert a person without annoying them? We went through many iterations and tested thousands of users to boil down the approach into a minimal user interface. It simply allows the employee to set their posture when they think they are in their optimal position. The result is a surprisingly small and almost cute interface. Only a button to access short instructional videos on how to sit and stand better, and analytics that gives feedback about the past behavior combined with tips to do even better.
It only worked when the person was seen from the front but what about posture- conscious people that have a monitor in front and their laptop to the side? All these challenges had to be tackled one by one. Now you can run Brightday in almost any lighting situation where you can see the face, with glasses, diverse faces, different and changing backgrounds. It just works. On a more technical level, we had to optimize how to scan the images of the camera more efficiently so they wouldn’t blow up the CPU (processing capacity) of the computer. For security and privacy reasons, we were committed to running the software on the computer. No images or videos would be sent to the cloud, as Apple’s Siri does. Everything stays on the computer. In the aptly named Vision Core™, we run a multitude of computer vision libraries, combined with filters, and systems. This reduces the search radius and gives the user a perfectly smooth and real-time experience when they see the movement feedback in the user interface.
But not so fast. We found ourselves walking the floors of huge offices like Airbnb as comfort consultants, interviewing ergonomists, physical therapists, chiropractors, and posture gurus, sitting through months of computer vision sessions with professors and PhDs to make the software work. Talking to HR managers, wellness leaders, and EHS to understand how this solution fits into the bigger picture of employee health and wellbeing or even retention and morale. Four years later the software is market ready and we’re not done testing, proving, and improving. Here are a couple of the breakthroughs we’ve built into the software.e. Computer vision With help of the GraspLab at UPenn we built the first prototype to see a person and their visible body parts in the camera and track their movements. It barely worked and broke with any light change, but it proved the concept. Also, the computer was running at full capacity to run the software.
We also wanted to keep it simple for the employees and organizations. The solution should require no extra hardware or expensive equipment. It needed to be purely software, deployable in seconds to thousands of employees, without a complicated onboarding processes or lessons to explain how it works. We looked at the workspace of desk workers and one smart item stood out on every desk. The laptop or desktop computer with a built-in or attached camera.
Suddenly this made our solution obvious and easy. We could use the camera to monitor the behavior of the person in front of the computer. With computer vision that can drive cars safely, we could detect body parts and positions of a person in three dimensions and give them feedback to correct themselves. Easy.
We had a simple idea four years ago: “Let’s help people - that are sitting at their computers during their long work hours - to become more comfortable.” We wanted to help them to sit or stand better and stay more active by nudging them into better behavior using cutting- edge technology. With all the breakthroughs we’ve witnessed over the years like dancing robots, self-driving cars, responding chatbots, computers that can see diseases, etc., that should be easy, right?
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