| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 醫學工程研究所碩博士班 === 95 === The posture is defined as the relative orientations among body segments. The human body can be balanced with less muscle effort under good posture. On the other hand, people would suffer neck or back pain as well as hurting of the body joints due to poor posture. In 2005, a Portable Posture Monitoring System (PMS) was developed at Institute of Biomedical Engineering NCKU. This system use Flex sensor to monitor human posture changing, and alarm the user to correct him/her poor posture by biofeedback. However, the reliability of this system is insufficient which makes it difficult to perform field evaluation. The aim of this research was to improve the reliability of the PMS: eliminate the false-alarm, and using the improved PMS to perform long-term human posture training. In the improvement of PMS, through a series of Flex sensor calibrations, the result showed that the Flex sensor should undergo at least 3k pre-bending cycles before use. With these pre-bending cycles, the sensitivity of the Flex sensor can be increased which reflex the human posture changing more precisely. Additional, both the hardware and software of the PMS were redesigned and calibration curve was obtained. With this improved PMS, six male subjects were selected to take the short term PMS functional evaluation with sitting posture. The result showed that, with the biofeedback, the PMS can help subjects to correct their poor posture. Further a male subject was selected to take the long-term posture training. Based on two indexes, the Duration of Poor Posture per hour and Frequency of Posture Correcting, it was identified that the PMS could help this subject to maintain a longer period of good posture after five-day (3 hr/day) of training. Further evaluations of this PMS are required to confirm its reliability especially with more subjects under daily activities.
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