Like many people, Simon Hong works long hours sitting at a desk, and after years of doing this, the 44-year-old MIT neuroscientist had the back pain to prove it.
He tried standing desks and high chairs. But while some of them helped his posture, none of them addressed the other major problem he experienced: immobility.
"It's a fact that the discs in the spine don't have blood vessels," Hong said. "Instead, they get nutrients through diffusion. So if you sit tight and don't move for hours, that's when the diffusion is at its minimum, and the discs become dry and, eventually, deformed."
As far as he could tell, the office furniture manufacturing industry had not even attempted to tackle this problem. So Hong decided to draw on his understanding of the nervous system and his undergraduate work in mechanical dynamics to invent his own solution.
With a unique split seat, the patented Chairbot allows users to either sit on the full seat or sit on one side and stand on the opposite leg. Half the seat can be either manually lowered or raised, or a timer set to alternate the sitting side every few minutes.
"I thought it would be a perfect solution because sometimes I could sit, and sometimes I could stand," he said, "and the chair would do it for me automatically."
Beginning April 2, Hong will attempt to raise $200,000 in one month on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to finance his robotic chair by accepting pre-orders for $2,700, or by offering a 137 percent credit toward a Chairbot, which will retail for $3,700 after May 2.
"Unfortunately, there are no stock components; everything is custom-made," he said. "But the hope is that if enough people buy the chair, it will be able to be mass-produced within a couple of years, bringing the price down to about $2,000."
Doris Peterkin, the CEO of the biotech OncoPep and a member of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Venture Mentoring Service, said she tried the chair for a couple of hours a day over a one-week period and initially found the frequent seat changes "a bit disruptive" but got the hang of it by the second day.
"I can really see how this would be of benefit to people with back problems," Peterkin said. "I spend my entire work day at the computer and currently address discomfort by leaving my desk. The chair does remove the need to do that."
Dr. Jeffrey C. Schneider, an assistant professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, said it's too early to tell exactly how useful the Chairbot will be.
"It is an interesting idea," Schneider said. "With more users and data, we will get a better sense of how well it works and if there are benefits."
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