Darma is a smart cushion that corrects your posture and reminds you to meditate

Sitting, especially for long periods of time, is the new public enemy. Office workers who sit eight hours a day risk organ damage and muscle degeneration in the long term, scientists warn. They’ll also die sooner, think slower, and damage their backs.

Health advocates now promote the virtues of the standing desk, but there’s another way. Sitting is inevitable, so why not teach people how to do it right? Darma is a smart cushion that aims to do just that.

The humble device looks like any other seat cushion, yet it contains a couple of hidden sensors. It detects your breathing patterns and stress levels, measures your heart rate, and determines your sitting posture.

Based on those readings, Darma prompts you to stand up and stretch if it finds you’ve been sitting for too long, nudges you towards the proper, upright sitting posture, and reminds you to meditate. It works in concert with an iOS app to give guided meditation and dish out a training program to release sitting stress and relax your back.

The Singapore-based startup is prepping for a Kickstarter campaign that will launch before the end of 2014.

Darma’s foundation consists of a fiber-optics sensor that’s embedded into the cushion. Micro-movements cause the transmitter to send light to the receiver. The differences in light transmission over time map out your breathing rate and other bodily movements, says Junhao Hu, the CEO and founder of Darma who has a PhD in optical communication, optical fiber sensor, and short pulse measurement.

While the fiber-optics sensor detects movement accurately, it can’t figure out the direction of the motion. To fix that, Darma adds a pressure sensor to the mix which knows whether you’re leaning forward, backward, or sideways.

Sleeping or sitting?

Hu didn’t originally set out to build a device to improve how people sit. While office workers slog eight hours in the office each day, they probably spend an equal amount of time sleeping. But building a smart cushion for sleeping folks presented a problem.

“With a sleep cushion, we could monitor but not improve your sleep. It’s not easy, for example, to automatically adjust the air-con temperature once the cushion detects that you’re feeling too cold,” says Hu.

Further, after joining HAXLR8R, a Shenzhen and San Francisco-based accelerator for hardware startups, mentors advised the team to focus on one use-case.

“The market for a smart cushion is big, and we can give instant improvement to people who are sitting too long.”

Hu hasn’t ruled out refocusing on the sack, but he’s waiting for smart home technology to mature. Apple’s HomeKit platform feels like a step forward. It could unify the disparate protocols governing intelligent appliances, making it possible to control the entire home from your smartphone.

But until that day comes, Hu will concentrate on bringing his smart cushion to the masses. He’s enlisted plenty of help.

Breathe in, breathe out