Could a blurry screen help fix your posture?

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How's your office chair feeling? We know from experience it can take hours of intermittent adjusting to get your chair position to hit the sweet spot. And even after all that adjustment, the angle still might be doing your back more harm than good. (Check out our best chairs post if you need an upgrade.)

That low burn in the small of your back and the tightness in your shoulders that comes from too long sitting at your desk could now be thing of the past due to a clever invention. UX designer Olesya Chernyavskaya put her design skills to good use (see our great web design tools list to improve your own skills) and created the Fix Posture website. 

The Fix Posture system is a nifty piece of design, that Chernyavskaya describes as an 'experiment'. Chernyavskaya made use of machine learning software PoseNet– a vision model that estimates the pose of a person in an image or video by checking where their joints are. She then enlisted the help of the webcam so that the website can automatically detect if the user's position becomes suboptimal.

You start by setting the optimal sitting position by giving the system reference points – detailed instructions are on the website but it's as you'd expect, feet on the ground, shoulders relaxed and back fully supported – and then the computer screen turns blurry if you aren't sitting correctly, for example if your shoulders hunch or you start slouching. 

The website explains in much more detail how the design works, including Chernyavskaya's processes and even details like user journey maps. We think it's a pretty cool experiment.

One of the designer's original mock ups of how the system would work

People on Twitter love the idea, with the original tweet gaining 1,096 retweets and 4,625 likes at time of writing. Responses range from outright joy:

To some interesting points about back health. 

Chernyavskaya also drew attention to her step-by-step design processes and codes, encouraging people to access them and remix their own stuff. It's worth checking our the rest of her Twitter feed for more AI experiments, including one that changes the size of text depending on how close to the screen the user is.

The Fix Posture website has certainly raised a discussion about future health-related possibilities in AI. Also included on the site are tips for keeping good posture and back health, and given the health implications that come from a sedentary career (see our post on how web design can affect your health, and what to do about it ), the link between AI and mental/physical health is potentially worth exploring further.

Read more:

• 8 steps to inclusive web design
• 7 signs of burnout
• Really useful responsive web design tutorials

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