Sahaj Movements
Dr. Jehn Hardy quoted, “It’s OK to take rest when you need it, not just when you EARN it.”
The project aims to propose an intervention that helps reduce sedentary workplace behavior and develops a habit of exercising during work hours. The intervention is a behavioral change model that helps replace a poor habit of sitting in incorrect postures with a new habit of moving at regular intervals.
Authors:
Timeline: 06 Months
Acknowledgments:
We want to thank companies like IBM IX, Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited, Hewlett Packard, RMZ Corporations, and others who have allowed us to visit their premises to conduct our academic research. We would also like to thank the employees who actively participated in our interview process. A special thanks to Johnson Jament and Shabari Rao for conducting rounds of masterclasses that helped us to frame our research better. We also extend our gratitude to our friends from Soma lab, without whom this journey would be incomplete.
We owe a big thank you to our project guide, Vineeta Rath. Through these 6 months, she always stood up with us. Her constant guidance has helped us to push our capabilities and deliver our best in the Covid-19 situation. Last but not the least, we would like to thank our family to provide us with all the love and care during our project spree.
If work is worship, isn’t body also the temple? Work is considered to be unavoidable and hence, it is worshiped. People are ignoring their bodies for the longest time to complete their work and that creates a situation where the work wins a fight over the body. Working professionals in IT companies have shown longer working hours at their desks and declining mobility. Eighty percent of adults in developed countries spend one-third of their working day doing sedentary, desk-based tasks; this represents high exposure to the established health risk of uninterruptedly sitting for too long. Health problems, even minor ones, can interfere with or even overshadow other aspects of life.
The practice of Yoga is a way to combat these negative effects of sitting continously at a desk. Can this practice be further implemented by the working class in the office ecosystem to enhance their body, mind, and muscle connection through easily done movements at their desk?
How can an external nudge create a realization for them to practice these movements to keep their ‘BodyFirst’ to preserve it for their future self?
Abstract
A posture is denoted by how the body is aligned and positioned, especially in states of activity. It occurs as a result of consciously choosing how to position our bodies with respect to the environment it is placed in. It is less voluntary and is a result of adapting to available spaces, different-sized tools, visual demands, pain, and so forth. In a corporate lifestyle, employees have always experienced a hunched back due to continuous working hours around their screens. Some complications of poor posture are severe back pain, muscle strain, ankle pain, potbelly, rounded shoulders, and so forth. A poor posture further leads to low employee morale, low efficiency in work, adverse effects on business, and employee behavioral change. Work postures are more than “just” a collection of right reflexes- it is the way an individual lives, a physical manifestation of their comfort zones with respect to their workspace. The habitual work postural patterns are the actions habitually held by people to serve their social and emotional needs. The challenges of trying to change a posture are not just musculoskeletal; it involves various factors like context, space, time, and awareness. Working professionals in IT companies have a “sitting disease”, or a sedentary lifestyle that seems harmless, but it has negative impacts on their health. A specific example of a poor work posture is ‘Upper-Crossed Syndrome’ coined by Vladimir Janda. It is the action of slouching, a lazy drooping posture. People are completely unaware that they slouch while sitting at the desk; forming and maintaining a poor posture is easy, but developing a habit of maintaining a good posture often requires good attention.
Background and Context
Mapping the current scenarios
Employees while working in an office or at home, sit in front of their computers for more than 2 hours continuously. Their ligaments and muscles are often strained to pull their spine to the erect position. As a result, the tissues start sending impulses to the brain to stimulate a voluntary response to the posture. These body signals are ignored, thus they start escalating in frequency and duration. Eventually, the brain receives it all and goes to our perception of back pain. The constant ignorance of these signals overwhelms the brain. The mental stress accumulated from this situation takes a remarkable toll on employee well-being. Can technology be used to solve the problem created by ‘technology’? Over the years of advancements, technology has improved the way healthcare professionals approach medical treatment. It plays a vital role in the corporate lifestyle and acts as an essential tool to serve many problems. In this project, a combination of body and technology will be used to extend the design space through the experiments of the products that exemplify the approach of Body First.
How is technology impacting poor postures?
State of Art
Standing out (standing away from one’s workspace) is the key goal for all employers in the IT workspaces to keep a check on employee wellness in order to improve posture and maintain a healthy work environment. Health teams in Hindustan Unilever take a stroll to check whether the employees are seated right or not.
Others like Apple and Indian workplaces like Oracle, Shell, Exxon, and so forth are opting for standing desks, which can be raised to a convenient and comfortable height when employees want to stand and work, maintaining a good balance between sitting and standing postures.
According to Dr. Chirag Thonse (Orthopaedic surgeon and specialist in Arthroscopy, sports injuries, and joint replacement surgeries at Fortis Hospital, Bengaluru), standing lowers the risk of back pain as it improves one’s body posture. Other employers have introduced wellness initiatives or apps and other physical sessions like dance and yoga, which are guided by a physiotherapist as well.
The inclusion of a ‘healthy break’ to combat the harmful effects long hours of sitting has on postures helps employees to break their work monotony and perform specific exercises at their desk.
To bring about a sense of consciousness amongst employees and a positive experience towards health, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has incorporated gamification as a part of employee health improvement.
Identified Gaps
The commercial success and positive review of these devices serve as an additional indicator that real-time feedback that can work as a tool for posture improvement. The product reviews included reported posture improvement and relief of related discomforts increased awareness and a better understanding of what constitutes a correct posture. Criticism varies per device, but can be summarized as complaints mentioned below:
Accuracy in posture detection
Issues with usability - unclear interaction, lack of instructions - or durability.
The gap in the current solutions is the invisibility of novelty in the approach. The current state of art study concludes that the products are either too costly as an intervention to be deployed in corporates. The online sessions are beneficial yet do not adapt to the routines of the employees. Due to increased work amidst the pandemic, working professionals are spending more time in front of their laptops, maintaining poor seating positions and so forth.
‘Fitting just in’ the schedule of different employees amidst their different work routines is not included. It does not get the users hooked to the system. For example, Instagram gives a new feed each time, but what about these products? Is there any fun to use? What will get the users to use these posture correctors? Some of them just stay as an external intervention and do not ‘fit just well’ in the corporate ecosystem.
Somaesthetic Approach
Our somatic practice gradually led to an increased awareness of our body and its potential for better ease of movement in our daily life. We let the ground research come from our own bodies. We used yoga to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movements. We want people to go through the journey we have experienced as we found a positive change in terms of its impact on our bodies; thus, we want them to feel the importance of the same.
Yoga is essentially a union of the body, mind, and breath. The practice of yoga could help people in the workplace to experience a better understanding of their body, posture corrections (incorrect posture acquired from long desk jobs), enhanced energies, and a relaxed state of mind to make better decisions and handle responsibilities with awareness. Desk Yoga could be incorporated with a certain series of exercises that can be performed without acquiring too much space and constraint in time.
As part of the project space, we have regularly practiced and documented our somatic practice. Yoga, as our somatic practice, has helped us to gain various bodily insights. It has made us aware of our posture and breath. A sense of mindfulness has been incorporated into our everyday tasks. It has contributed to increased body awareness and a pleasant sense of wholeness and balance. We felt that yoga as a tool in somaesthetics is not only leading us towards bringing mastery over the body, mind, and emotional faculties but also as a powerful tool to manifest those hidden potentialities.
In this process, we learned and understood the expression of nature around us. Also, we felt that inner growth and outer expression go hand in hand. Considering our hectic lives in college, it has become a never-ending race. Also, the pressure we faced during our internship made our bodies worse. This race has sometimes led to dissatisfaction and frustration. Eventually, this leads to a stressful situation. Yoga will allow the employees to experience a change in their bodies. The change will be a positive reward that will lead to a behavioral change of practicing it daily. Thus, the yoga practice will be used to notice the pain and embrace one’s body.
Research Approach
After finding our own positionality in the project space, secondary research was done to understand the background and context of our target audience. It was taken forward by understanding the posture theory, ergonomics, current state of the art, current scenario gaps, and technology's role in our project. The process of somaesthetics was used to validate thoughts through our bodies. A mere understanding of ‘Yoga’ was gained by practicing it daily. The project space helped us to draw connections with our somatic practice and made us realize it’s impact on our bodies. We also spoke to multiple experts and doctors to understand the importance of yoga in a corporate space. Based on our secondary research and continuous exploration of our own bodies, we both formed our set of curiosities. This set of curiosities helped us to conduct our in-field research.
Target Audience, Context, Objective, Background, and Hypothesis
Target Audience: Urban India professionals working with corporates have nine to twelve hours of sitting jobs.
Context: Workplace sedentary behavior has significantly increased in the past decades. The job of working professionals demands minimum physical exercises and increased screen time, and the effect on the employee in terms of productivity and health is immense.
Slouching, slumping, leaning, or even sitting with unbalanced weight on one side of the chair can cause back, neck, and shoulder pain or a myriad of musculoskeletal disorders. We decided to focus on this specific target audience because of the nature of their job, its abundance across all industries, and the potential for intervention.
Objective:
The objective of this study is to understand the following:
Reasons for poor body postures maintained by professionals working with corporates.
Relevance of yoga as a healing process in the corporate space.
Background:
Health plays a key role in corporate spaces. Poor workplace well-being has a major impact on the productivity, engagement, attendance, and profit levels of the company. The most common health problems in the office are physical inactivity and asymmetric physical strain, especially around phone calling or typing. These can lead to degenerative processes impacting discs, nerves, and tendons and may cause pain and tissue damage. Lack of motion can lead to muscle degeneration. Overdoing motions, such as mouse clicking, can cause inflammation and nerve compression. How can we prioritize the aspect of health in a mechanic space like a Mnc?
Hypothesis:
Poor body postures maintained by working professionals in IT companies lead to changes in their bodies that further impact their mood and the functioning of the mind. Yoga practice could be used to enhance the connections between the body, brain, and mind, now as a tool of tools to design bodily conscious interactions.
An exploration in the above area needs to be conducted and hence understood. Prior to this research, an understanding of poor postures and their adverse health effects were studied. A study of current solutions to improve the same was also focused on. Also, a prior understanding of yoga as a tool for healing poor postures was done.
Interview Process
A mixed methodology interview was conducted to understand the complexities of the situation. A combination of both quantitative and qualitative data was gathered and analyzed. It reflected the participant’s point of view, which was grounded in their experience. This gave us a scope to present complete knowledge grounded in theory and practice.
Research Analysis
Research Analysis was a vital part of the research process. It included categorizing, classifying, and organizing the various data points gathered from different sources to directly inform what we share as outcomes of the research and the key findings. This was carried out in 3 phases :
Phase 1: Three-Step Approach - This included 3 steps, wherein the data points were reviewed, collected, and tagged, thus looking back at the connections and codes to find the relationships between them to indicate themes.
Phase 2: Expert Interview - An expert interview was carried out to gather an in-depth understanding of the subject, which gave us another view into the current trends, and what might or might not be the prospects.
Phase 3: What’s new? - The outbreak of the novel coronavirus. (COVID-19) pandemic led us to look at a new lens and the new normal of working from home.
Key Insights
The key reason for an employee’s back pain is not their poor posture but a stationary poor position maintained for a longer time.
Habitual postural patterns are associated with musculoskeletal pain, and improvement for this requires postural awareness.
Breaking the stationary nature of work is needed to achieve regular movements.
We can’t eliminate a bad habit, but we can replace it with a good one. A good posture is a consistent habit.
Learning and repeating a new movement consciously will help to form a habit.
Habits are a cycle of cue-routine-reward. We need to make the routine worth remembering because our brain chooses a routine that is worth remembering.
Constant reminders are required in an office space to get work done. Positive Reinforcement could be used as a reminder to help increase the probability of specific behavior occurring.
The immediate presence of reinforcement after the behavior increases the efficiency of the desired behavior.
Fear of survival prompts an action.
The perceived importance of posture is much higher than the actual importance of it.
A yoga practice will become more somatic when we release the sense of “doing” and allow for more of an experiential approach.
Connected comfort: Considering the work-from-home scenario, homes need to be as convenient and comfortable as the office spaces. This will help to blur boundaries between homes and MNC’s. The shift in dynamics of the workspace should not impact the work.
Ideations
Concept Note
Our somatic practice of performing yoga has made us realize that consistency is the key to change. We have seen our own bodies getting evolve by practicing yoga as a part of our daily routine. Taking inspiration from this practice, we aim to conceptualize a system that enables employees to build a healthy habit of practicing yoga at the workplace to reduce their sedentary behavior.
Working professionals in corporates spend approximately 8-10 hours a day seated on their desks. In order to view the screen clearly employees lean their bodies forward. Over some time, they are likely to develop a poor habit of slouching their backs. We are utilizing a behavioural change model to replace an old habit of continuous sitting with a new habit of movements at regular intervals.
The Sahaj Movement model is a step-by-step approach to address this issue. It gradually breaks the poor habitual postural patterns formed by the employees. In this model, a posture is monitored, a trend analysis is done, and appropriate feedback is given. The intensity of the reinforcement gradually increases to assure the chances of behavioral change. Positive reinforcement is in the form of constant reminders, which creates body awareness for the employees. After creating the awareness and analysis, assistance is provided through the Sahaj app in the form of easy-to-do exercises inspired by yoga to practice mindfulness and support their physical health.
We have leveraged the image processing algorithm to detect the face of the employee sitting in front of the laptop. Using this as our input data, we determine whether the employee is slouching or not. The complete system is designed in python with OpenCV in the backend used for image processing.
Haar cascade classifier converts the faces into black and white images and then finds all the edges in the picture. Based on these edges, coordinate points are mapped in a 3D vector space which varies from person to person and posture to posture. It further calculates based on the position of our head with respect to the desktop. With these data points, we are making a classification algorithm to classify between these different postures. Since posture varies from person to person, it gives certain threshold points. A condition-based assessment is done for face recognition. We both have a basic understanding of writing code. Hence, we used the open-source online file to modify the output and insert the real-time image.
Credits: Justin Shenk, ML, CV Research Engineer with neuroscience
Link: https://github.com/JustinShenk/sensei
Why CV?
CV stands for ‘Computer Vision, a field of artificial intelligence that train computers using digital images from cameras and deep learning models to accurately identify and classify objects. Improper computer usage amongst working professionals leads to a head forward posture (tend to slouch & bend their spine forward). This head-forward posture puts considerable pressure on the human neck. A normal human head weighs around 4.54 kg, A head forward posture increases the effective weight on the neck to 12.54 kg.
Why a visual?
The visual cortex takes up a quarter of the entire brain. 90% of the brain’s sensory input comes from visual sources. The visual sense is the most impactful sense of the body although, smell is the strongest sense.The eyes are the physical portal through which data from the environment is collected and sent to the brain for processing. Our eyes aren’t just performing a task, they are the portal through which our brain can tell us what they see. The purpose of a visual process is to arrive at a certain kind of response.
How will the visuals be?
The illustrations will be in the form of a visual satire. It is a medium used to draw attention to a negative aspect of an object, event, person, or place. Unlike written satire, visual satire uses fewer words and relies heavily on visual features to convey its message. In this approach, the working professionals will be shown an exaggerated version of their future body if the poor posture is continued to be maintained. This will help to make people imagine their health risks more clearly.
How will it work:
The visual portrayed in the idea is a comparison of two images, one that has the real-time image of their head slouching with a text saying “You look like this,” and on the other side is an exaggerated image that is delineating the worst-case scenario of their future bodies captioning, “This could be you”. Both these images would pop up simultaneously to make the user aware of their current body position v/s their future body posture. The image will stay for 5 seconds on the screen, and then it will autoclose.
Illustration Samples
How will it pop up on screens?
Code Demo
Sahaj App
The Sahaj app is about daily movements done at the workplace in the form of easy-to-do exercises inspired by somatic yoga. It helps to practice mindfulness and support their physical health. Somatic cues would be given throughout the process.
One might be wondering, what is Somatic Yoga?
It’s our self-initiated somaesthetic practice, which revolves around how the movement is done and not how one holds the movement. It’s about cultivating awareness using simple nudges to connect the body and mind better. It is about the internal experience of the movement. It emphasizes moving with the least effort and at a pace where the brain registers the movements and forms new neural connections. This makes the movement feel easier. The step-by-step approach will be the source of guidance. Our goal is to achieve these movements on the go, which calls for an application over a web-based online portal.
Wireframes
User Testing
We interviewed 9 people, including 7 males and 2 females.
Introduction: The users were informed about the testing process, but the final idea was not revealed to them. Prior consent for the same was taken verbally. We did our user testing in two ways:
By using our final prototypes (visuals and app)
Using the actual code
Process: The testing was only done with our family and friends. We had certain limitations to visiting our neighbors because of the rules and regulations in our societies due to Covid-19. Just for testing purpose, we asked our users to continuously work for an hour. After 20 minutes, we showed them a paper prototype with a notification. After another 20 minutes, if there was no movement observed, a visual was shown on their screen. The display of the visuals was done via an iPad on their screens. We also tested the code with our users to give them a real-time experience. There were some key changes in behaviors and expressions observed.
Key Observations:
Behaviors:
A strong glance at the visual notification was observed. They showed mixed emotions of fear and laughter.
A full-size visual notification was more impactful.
A quick response was shown through the interaction with the app.
The app made them curious. It was interesting to see that one person kept his eyes shut while performing the somatic cues.
The somatic cues helped the users to calm down during their work.
They mentioned that the notifications were exaggerated. They further expressed that they don’t want to see their bodies like this.
The image made them introspect about their current posture.
Actions:
Out of 9 users, 3 users responded to our first notification. They did make little movements after that.
6 users ignored the first notification. Upon asking the reason, some of them listed by them were:
The terminal notification was too small in the corner of the screen. It barely impacted their workflow.
The users were really engrossed in their work.
There was an unavailability of the action button.
Feedback
Keep it up!
The posture doc part of the app was appreciated. They were happy to get customized suggestions according to their needs and pains.
They appreciated the contrast used in visuals and application. Ms. Smita said, “The colors of the visual created an alertness for my body while the design and the color of the app helped me to calm myself down.
Critical concerns:
A user said, “What happens after 40 minutes? What if I continue to maintain a bad posture?”
Our idea is to give the users constant reminders to form a behavioral loop. A full-size image will break their workflow. If the user does not move after 40 minutes, still the visual will be registered at the back of their heads.
Code concerns:
We knew the concerns in advance because of the limitations of the materials. We used Open CV for our prototype instead of a flex sensor. This was done due to the unavailability of the sensor during Covid-19. The concerns pointed out by our users were:
False user data could be saved.
Due to privacy concerns, many people keep their front cameras off.
Scope for improvement
Users wanted to look at the app's most popular exercises.
They wanted to see their own avatars in the visuals. It would make them feel more connected. (This can be done if the integration with the code is possible)
