Evaluating Expert Feedback and Market Solutions
Understanding the core issue with bad posture…
Posted 2023-10-03 | Previous Post: Searching for Problems… | Next Post: Presenting our PDP and Gauging Peer Feedback
With a team member personally affected by back pain, we had the opportunity to speak and discuss openly with a professional, it truly changed the direction of our project, and solidified our focus.
Sedentary behaviour is a precursor to lower back pain, which has unfortunately become a silent epidemic in our society. - Zawar Zahid, Physiotherapy Industry Expert
Discussions with domain experts helped underline the mistakes and misconceptions the team had with the link between posture and back pain. Most popular and casual discussion around posture tends to focus on “bad posture” and “good posture”, and much energy is spent on developing the “ideal posture” or the “ideal ergonomics”, and while important concepts individually, many overlook that simply keeping any position for too long has adverse effects.
Your best posture, is your next posture
Staying in any postion for too long will place undue stress on specific areas of the spine. Simply encouraging movement, allowing the spine to reconfigure, redistribute the stress periodically can go a long way in improving posture and reducing back pain. Much in the same way humans tend to blink less when watching an illuminated screen, when we sit and are working we can often hold the same position for extended periods of time without properly readjusting our back!
Moving forward with this new perspective, we could quickly revisit existing posture and back pain devices already on the market, and identify that many of them were aiming to have users hold only one position, the “correct” position, often in ways that would surely be uncomfortable, intrusive and easily cast aside when the user lost motivation. Many reviews of such products described them as a ‘gimmick’ or finding them overly disruptive.
With this in mind, we set forth with our new inspiration, and PostureMax was formed!
We managed to extablish our initial set of specifications/constraints, and criteria, which would help up finally begin to refine our problem and potiential solutions:
