**7. Conclusion**

**Figure 8.** Results of wearing time (minutes).

**Figure 7.** Results of good posture percentages of time (%).

52 Biofeedback

This chapter develops a posture training tool to invoke people' awareness of their bad posture so that they can timely improve their poor posture and maintain good posture while sitting. A collaborative, social-networked posture training (CSPT) approach is used in the design of the posture training tool. Three technologies of real-time posture monitoring, biofeedback and collaborative social networks are adopted in the CSPT framework, which is composed of a sophisticated posture monitoring headset, a training lumbar belt, a smartphone, a socialnetwork CSPT App and cloud services. Experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed CSPT framework with a group of six middle-school teenagers. We design three testing scenarios to explore the effects of biofeedback and social networking. Our experiment results indicate that the proposed CSPT framework with posture monitoring and biofeedbacks are effective in increasing the percentage of time in good posture for each teen in the group. Experiment results also show that peer influences and social support are crucial and effective to encourage the teens in maintaining good posture and being willing to wearing the posture training tool for longer time.

Some mHealth apps like iOS Health [51] and Google Fit [52] and other mobile wearable fitness devices [53] are available in the market. To our best knowledge, none of them implement social networks or social media functions. Future research may develop an integrated social networks platform to provide health services or bio-sensing functions of heartbeats, blood glucose and electrocardiogram (EKG). Although the motivation of this research is preliminarily for posture training while sitting, the applications of the proposed CSPT framework and the devices are not limited to sitting posture only. They can be applied to other workplace environments, sports and performance psychology. Further research directions may also extend the developed biofeedback techniques to applications like driver sleepiness detection, core stability training, therapeutic, fitness and so on.
