Are You Sitting With Good Posture? Tracking the Position of the Legs via 2-D LiDAR

Francesco Pistolesi, Michele Baldassini, Beatrice Lazzerini

Abstract: Desk workers spend long periods sitting with poor posture. This leads to back pain and musculoskeletal disorders. Current solutions to track posture use sensors or cameras that may make sitting uncomfortable and violate privacy. This letter presents a system that detects the leg position when sitting at a desk via 2-D light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and a support vector machine running on a Raspberry Pi 4. The system recognizes six common positions: legs slightly open with knees bent, legs crossed, one leg on the other leg’s knee, legs extended forward, backward, and legs parallel with an angle of ~90° between upper and lower legs. The results of an experiment involving 30 workers showed an accuracy of 99.2%.