Beautiful posture glasses,B.P.G

What it does

The recent global and rapid spread of information terminals has caused stiff shoulders and back pain due to the bad posture of people who use them. Our device can transform people's posture into a beautiful posture by understanding the shape of their spine.

Your inspiration

I have been suffering from stiff shoulders and back pain since I was in elementary school because I love playing games so much and am so passionate about them. After entering university, I worked at NPO teaching courses for elementary, junior high and high school students to develop their creativity in science and engineering. What I saw there was that the children were so focused on their work that they were bending forward. if they continued with bad posture, they would suffer from stiff shoulders and back pain like me, so I decided to invent the device that would correct their posture when using information devices.

How it works

The Beauty Posture Glasses are equipped with an acceleration sensor and a ToF sensor to measure the head tilt angle and viewing distance. These two values alone can estimate the shape of the spine and the angle of the spine, which is considered medically important, with extremely high accuracy. (Correlation coefficient R>0.9) What this means medically is that the spine shape, which previously could only be measured with expensive and extensive equipment such as X-rays, can now be easily estimated in real time, non-invasively, by anyone, anywhere, at any time. We are currently conducting research with the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Tohoku University School of Medicine, in the hope that this will allow us to estimate the risk of developing symptoms such as back pain and stiff shoulders caused by the accumulation of bad posture, according to each individual's condition.

Design process

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to start my own business with my own inventions, so I enrolled in the School of Engineering at Tohoku University and studied hard about sensors, a key device for IoT. In order to test what I had learned, I participated in iCAN, an international application development contest held in 30 countries around the world, 8 times. As a result, I won the first prize in the world competition twice. B.P.G, the winner of the 2017, was simply a handmade device that encourages people to improve their posture by making it difficult for them to see the screen when their head is tilted at an angle that is generally considered to be a bad posture. Furthermore, I put B.P.G together as a business plan and won one of the largest business plan contests for students in Japan. In March 2020, I went to the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Tohoku University to see if there was any future potential for my project, and they were very interested, so we started a joint research project. As a result of a year of research and development with the School of Medicine, we have succeeded in developing an algorithm to estimate the shape of the spine, and through future research, we can now expect to be able to define the correct posture based on medical evidence.

How it is different

Existing medical devices that measure the shape of the spine, such as X-rays, can only measure the shape of the spine invasively, at the moment of taking an image, in a limited place such as a hospital. However, the B.P.G. system we developed can estimate the spine shape easily, non-invasively, anywhere, and in real time, including changes over time. We have filed a PCT application for the algorithm for spine shape estimation, and the ISR report shows that there is no relevant prior literature, and that it is novel and inventive. In the future, we plan to use this device to conduct clinical research to determine what kind of spine shape and how long it should be maintained before symptoms develop. There have been products that measure the angle of a single point on the neck or waist, but they only estimate the angle of the neck or waist, and it is medically incorrect to judge posture based on this alone. To be honest, they are not even competitive.

Future plans

The current research that we have completed validating is the estimation of spine shape in the sitting position. We are planning further developmental research, hoping that by combining more wearable sensor devices, we can estimate the spine shape not only in the sitting position but also in the standing and supine positions. Based on our research to date, we hope to correct posture and support spine health from the perspective of preventive medicine. We will position the market created by such thinking as the "spine wellness" market, and enhance the health of mankind through the spine.

Awards

・iCAN'17 World Tournament : first prize. ・The 16th Campus Venture Grand prix : the Prize of Minister of Education, Culture, Sports , Science and Technology. ・Business Design Discovery & Presentation η 2020-2021: Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications Award. ・Tohoku University Business Plan Contest Vol.4:Winner.