APC: Contactless healthy sitting posture monitoring with microphone array

The prevalence of poor sitting posture in daily work has become a growing concern among office workers and students due to the associated health problems. To address this issue, we design an acoustic sitting posture care system (termed, APC) based on a circular microphone array. Compared with classic posture recognition technologies such as visual perception and sensors, acoustic sensing naturally possesses advantages such as privacy protection and contactless capabilities. Concretely, our system leverages a customized and inaudible sound signal sent from a speaker to a user’s body, and an echo signal preprocessing method to sense the body posture. Our system comprises three modules: signal generation and collection, signal preprocessing, and posture classification. The signal generation and collection module is designed to create an appropriate signal waveform for transmitting the sound signal. We also develop a unique alignment method for received signals to implement background interference cancellation. In the signal preprocessing module, we propose a body profile extraction method based on the phase difference between received signals. In the posture classification module, we design an attention mechanism based classification network that can map the output of the previous module to different sitting posture categories. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 98.4% for five common sitting postures. Furthermore, case studies conducted under different practical conditions have validated the robustness of our system.