Prana: Monitor your posture and breathing with this smart device
updated the 6 October 2015 à 23:16
Staying seated for long hours or living a sedentary lifestyle may just be slowly causing ill effects on your breathing and posture. Here’s a wearable device that could resolve it.
Good posture associated with a good breathing rate, is an important facet of everyone’s well-being. However, even though we’re conscious of this fact, it is still difficult to do. Luckily, with advances in technology, we now have a fun way to simultaneously track our posture and breathing.
Andre Persidsky, an engineer and patented inventor who launched the medical device, and Alex Ahlund, an entrepreneur and iOS industry veteran, developed Prana; the first wearable tracker that bases its technology on the interconnection between good breathing and good posture. “It’s been known for thousands of years that good posture facilitates good breathing, so it made sense to us to track both… Good breath and posture can provide many benefits, including reduced stress and less back pain,” said Dr. Paul Abramson, M.D., Chief Science Officer of Prana.
The device helps people to stand up straight and improve their breathing pattern by using gaming elements to encourage long term engagement.
How does it work?
As a personal coach, Prana will track how you sit and whether you are breathing with your diaphragm or your chest. “We wanted to offer a truer, more holistic picture of breathing quality, which necessitated factoring in posture, but also providing the capability to distinguish between chest and belly breathing, as most traditions of good breathing (and recent science) emphasise the value of breathing from the abdomen,” said Andre Persidsky.
The tracker clips onto your clothes at the waistline and is synced to an accompanying app on your smartphone to communicate with you via Bluetooth.
You can choose the ‘active training’ mode, where your monitoring results are transformed into a percentage score. If you get a low score, you will receive bespoke training exercises from all over the world, including Yoga Pranayama, Tai Chi and Buteyko. With these, you can practice and improve your breathing and posture. The exercises come in the form of a game – like the ‘Flappy bird’ game – which invites you to breathe by flying through a zen garden, and collect flowers by carefully controlling inhalation and exhalation, while maintaining good posture.
Or you can opt for the ‘passive tracking’ modes where you will receive push alerts when it detects signs of stress breathing or bad posture.
As we sit for at least 8 hours per day, this device could be very useful in learning how to do it better. Prana is not yet on sale but according to its website, it should be ready very soon for £150 (approx. SGD350).
Lindsay POUI-DI
