2024 · Hardware / AI
Posture Pal — Real-Time Posture Corrector
Posture detection wired to hardware feedback via a Nuxt UI and serial bridge.
Hardware & Computer Vision
The problem
Desk workers slouch for hours and ignore passive on-screen reminders. The feedback loop only works if it's physical and immediate — a spray, not a popup.
The constraint
The vision side and the actuator side are completely different stacks: pose detection runs where the camera is, the solenoid lives on a microcontroller, and a human wants to toggle and tune the whole thing. The pieces had to talk over plain serial with one clear signal.
What I built
A system in three layers. A companion vision program estimates posture quality continuously. An Express server exposes POST /posture (app.cjs): it receives { postureQuality } and translates it — "Good" sends 'off', anything else sends 'on' — via the serialPort module to the embedded side, where a Raspberry Pi Pico program controls the actuator. A Nuxt web UI drives the workflow and sits in front of the Express bridge. Earlier iterations included dedicated pico firmware over serial before the protocol was simplified to the single on/off message.
The outcome
A working hardware-in-the-loop prototype: detection crosses the wire, the solenoid responds within milliseconds, and the whole thing is tunable from a browser.