“Wearable-Assisted Exercise Posture Correction”
Daniel Galindo-Navarro, S.B. ’18, electrical engineering
Advisor: Ye Ding, postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute
Weight-lifting causes about 49,000 injuries in the U.S. each year, and many of those are the result of an individual’s failure to maintain a neutral back posture throughout the exercise. Galindo-Navarro developed a lightweight, wearable device that measures a user’s spinal alignment during exercise and provides real-time, targeted feedback if there are dangerous deviations. His back harness uses inertial measurement units to track the user’s relative orientation and compares that to a user-defined mean posture. The device vibrates and a light flashes within 50 milliseconds if it detects a deviation. The harness also holds potential as a tool to collect and analyze back posture data.
“Through this project, I learned the importance of being able to justify engineering and design decisions with data and metrics, and show you’ve met design specifications. As an engineer, you can’t convince people of a solution or design because it ‘looks right,’” he said. “Instead, it is critical to know how to evaluate solutions to open-ended problems in quantifiable, convincing ways.”