The Posture Pack is a smart backpack designed to ensure back health for the user.
We designed this backpack because many people around the world suffer from a lot of back pain that can impact them for the rest of their lives because of poor posture and back strain caused from excessive loads from backpacks. So we created the Posture pack to prevent back injury especially for children and teens.
To create our backpack, we drew inspiration from ergonomic backpacks and we studied the natural curvature of the human spine. We also researched the different negative health effects caused by overweight backpacks and tried to make our design combat these problems.
We envisioned our model to have force sensors to detect when the backpack has an overweight load which will then prompt an LED light to flash, alerting the wearer of the problem. We also designed our backpack to have an ergonomic design for user comfort and back support.
Our first iteration was just a carboard backpack that featured a lumbar support curve, chest straps, and hip straps. There is nothing much to it other than that. We didn't think about the electronic components yet.
Here we have the first prototype of the backpiece and we decided that it should cover the entire back of the user.
This is our second prototype. We placed the prototype backpiece onto this iteration to see how everything would fit together. There are no straps to this iteration because we made this just to test out how the backpiece would fit onto the backpack and if it was a comfortable design.
Here you can see that we started working on the electronic components of the backpack. We hooked up an arduino and breadboard to force sensors and started coding as well.
This is the final version of the backpiece that is made out of CNC foam. It has an improved design that better contours to the body and the edges are more curved to prevent iritiation to the user.
After a lot of work, we finally finished the entire backpack. We attached the final backpiece to an actual backpack and hooked up all of the electronics. One thing you might notice is that we added vibration motors to our design. This is meant to alert the user when he/she is wearing the backpack with one strap.
Here is a closer look at our electronics.
Final images
We faced a few challenges, one very big one in our final design was securing the electronics and indivisiual wires when we attacched them to the backpack.
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