Design and development of a 3D printed water driven spinal posture corrector

Everyday millions of people perform office work with long sitting in front of computers. This results in a poor posture in the spinal which is normally called Kyphosis. This problem becomes significant when the upper back of the spine crosses the angle of 5 degrees. Among the types of poor postures, there is one as slouching. Slouching for a longer duration of time with more frequency may result in spine bends on the upper region and becomes noticeable in the personality, especially during walking and sitting on the couch. When the spine angle in the upper back region reaches 50°, it starts giving pain to the patient which leads to spine surgery. Commonly orthopedics recommends spinal fusion surgery at this angle. Therefore, this article presents a novel design of a device with an automatic system for avoiding the slouch and retracting the angle of the spine for a good posture. In this device, there is a novel skeleton system, shoulder pads, a controller unit, and a McKibben actuator-based forcing mechanism. The complete system of this device is manufactured in a 3D printer using FDM technology. Pressurized water is pumped into the McKibben actuators in control conditions for generating the back force to retract the spine angle as well as to position the shoulders for avoiding the slouch. With the change in the angle of posture gives a shift in the values of water pressure. That results in the generation of back force in the actuators for correcting the posture. The skeleton is tested on people with a posture problem in the range of 20° to 45°. Results show that the pressure variation from 160 to 190 kPa in the water triggers the signal to generate a force between 19 and 34 N that is decreasing the posture angle up to 25°. The force produced by McKibben actuators is evaluated theoretically as well as experimentally, and the plots give harmonious behavior as well. The experiments illustrate that the proposed skeleton produces a nominal backward force to correct the posture automatically.