ALIGN

Hack your posture: wearable sensor and real-time posture feedback for desk warriors.

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Inspiration

As CS + CE students, we spend hours hunched over laptops, often forgetting to sit up straight. We wanted a simple way to help ourselves and others maintain good posture throughout the day.

What it does

ALIGN uses a wearable harness with an IMU sensor to detect posture in real time. The Arduino streams posture data to a Node.js server, which updates a web dashboard live. The dashboard displays a Chart.js graph of your posture over time, shows your current status, and triggers a chime plus vibration via a Grove vibration motor whenever your posture switches from good to bad.

How we built it

We attached an IMU sensor and a Grove vibration motor to a harness connected to an Arduino. The Arduino reads the sensor’s Y-axis and triggers the vibration motor and a chime when poor posture is detected. Using Node.js and the serialport library, posture data is sent to a WebSocket server, and the frontend updates the Chart.js live chart and status display in real time.

Challenges we ran into

  • The first IMU we tried was powered with 5V, which was too high and caused issues.
  • We downloaded two different Arduino libraries and each had different functions and syntax, which made the code harder to unify.
  • We had to experiment with the slouch threshold to find the “sweet spot” that accurately detected poor posture without too many false alerts.
  • Ensuring accurate frontend updates required trimming and normalizing sensor data.
  • Making sure the vibration motor didn't affect the data the IMU picked up was tricky.
  • Auto-detecting the correct COM port reliably across Windows systems added complexity.
  • Accessing the Arduino port from Node while the IDE was open caused “Access denied” errors.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a fully functional wearable posture monitor with live data visualization.
  • Integrated a Grove vibration motor and chime for instant feedback on bad posture.
  • Created a clean, user-friendly dashboard with a real-time Chart.js graph to track posture trends.
  • Solved tricky hardware-to-software communication issues on the first hackathon project try.

What we learned

We gained hands-on experience with Arduino sensors, Grove motors, serial communication, WebSockets, Chart.js, and real-time frontend updates. We also learned how small tweaks in timing and data handling can make a big difference in user experience and reliability.

What's next for ALIGN

  • Monitoring scoliosis progression.
  • Making the hardware more compact and wearable.
  • Developing a mobile app for posture tracking on the go.
  • AI-powered coaching and personalized reminders.
  • Expanding sensor use to other body parts to support movement or alignment improvement, like gait correction or ergonomic training.

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