Hi Alex and Daniel! This looks really cool and I believe I am in your set of target customers/potential early adopters.

Personally, I'd much moreso prefer a self-hosted option such as a desktop application with strong guarantees about limits on cloud upload over anything cloud-based for this use case, specifically around concerns about how the webcam data could be used/abused. I don't see any immediate FAQ page or somewhere I could determine this information. Not seeing this information gives me some immediate pause in trying out your application or signing up.

Similarly in addition to some discussion in your FAQs etc. around the limits of how the webcam imagery is used, I would personally love and feel more trust in the product if the FAQs could provide any data or transparency on how the training corpus takes into account issues of proper representation across ppl with different posture considerations (scoliosis comes to mind) as well as the overall representation of different demographics (race, age, gender) within that training set, and/or how the model training procedure defines or determines "correct" posture.

Zen is a desktop app so I'm happy to see that we satisfy your preference.

Those are great ideas. We'll be adjusting our website to make it more clear!

Yeah, thanks for being receptive to my feedback! FWIW I would not personally install your desktop app without further understanding of these other areas.

However, if the adjustments you describe could sufficiently allay my concerns and make the proper guarantees then I would be interested in such a product potentially.

As it stands I feel without said information there's just too much risk and uncertainty both as a private individual and employee to use this app.

Yeah, no.

* If I click on the web site, there is no privacy policy given. It just links back to the front page (Chrome)

* Anything with a subscription has got to send some data somewhere.

* All the language about "privacy-centric" with on actual background looks really sketchy.

Would you trust a small, unknown company to have access to your web cam? My experience is that few enough companies follow their own privacy policies.

For some reason I jumped to expecting this to morph the display in the direction of slouch, (such as tilting and shrinking into the lower-left corner a bit say) encouraging you to move opposite (sit up/lean right) to 'get a better view' as though the monitor were a window into a 3D world.

Probably hard to implement, but have you considered anything like that? I imagine it'd be quite a nice subtle hint, that you'd subconsciously correct for even.

Just seeing/reading this submission made me correct my posture though, thanks :/.

That's a really cool idea and I'm curious to see if it can be implemented. However, a lot of people use Zen while working, so I can imagine the tilt can become quite annoying, especially if you're in deep work.

I've been using Zen for a couple of months now, and it's been really helpful in helping me stand up straight (I use a standing desk). Very unobtrusive and still works even though I'm on Zoom all day. The team is great too -- they've been super responsive any time I've run across a weird edge case (it's been a long time since it's happened, but when it did they had it sorted super quickly)

We're delighted to see you've been enjoying Zen. Always more than happy to help!

If the software and vision model are local what is the value given for the recurring fee? How is this better than a posture correcting garment or brace?

To answer your first question, we constantly improve the computer and mathematical models to improve the accuracy of the 'posture session'. We also offer in-depth analytics about your posture tendencies and also provide and constantly update libraries of exercises and (ergonomic) educational videos. Moreover, we constantly develop new features that users ask for, that are meant to tackle other parts of your wellness while you work (i.e. walk breaks, exercise breaks etc.)

Using a posture correcting garment or brace will actually make your muscles weaker, since they rely on external force to maintain your posture. This is very detrimental long-term and has a negative effect on your back health and overall health. They also don't help you build good posture habits, since you just have good posture while wearing a brace, but when you take it off, you're very likely to have bad posture again.

Makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it.

For sure!

For anyone wondering it is Electron app, that packs some heavy web app assets(300mb + 150mb runtime), but still loads rest of web app from https://client.getposturehealth.co, and then it uses google pretrained posenet tensorflowjs model[0][1]. (loads it from https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/savedmodel/posene...).

In perfect world one would made it offline, release it at fixed price and be done with it, in our imperfect world it is turned in infinite cash-cow that requires connectivity and bazillion metrics.

[0] https://medium.com/tensorflow/real-time-human-pose-estimatio...

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs-models/blob/master/posene...

So far we haven't had people report issues or complain about the app or its performance. We also test the app on laptops ranging from really low range and old laptops to the latest MacBook or Windows laptops and so far we haven't encountered any issues ourselves. Electron has been really useful since it allows us to build apps for different operating systems, hence we can support more users who are looking for a solution like ours.

While we do use the 'posenet' library, this is around 25% of what goes on in the app during a 'posture session' - we need to actually label the multitude of positions that users can be in and we also need to calculate the degree to which users are in those positions. Moreover, we also offer walk breaks, exercise breaks and (ergonomic) educational videos that are really popular among our users.

Thank you for your comment!

> Electron has been really useful since it allows us to build apps for different operating systems

But you don't support Linux?

Sounds like you're using machine learning & computer vision. How much diversity is in your training set? I can see obesity, skin tone, and gender playing a role in this. Or, is it entirely trained on photos of the user? Even so... I see you're looking for users' ears. Can it cope with ears hidden by hair, or chunky earrings that change daily?

The training set used has a lot of diversity. There is no training done on frames of the user - those photos are not stored, process or transferred in any way.

We have users with long hair that covers their ears or users that wear headphones that go over their ears and head and they use the app perfectly fine. One thing that can affect the accuracy of the algorithms is the lighting in the room - poor or extremely strong lighting in some cases can lead to slight inaccuracies.

Sorry if I am not understanding but you say the photos of user are not processed but aren’t the frames from the webcam stream processed to extract data about the users posture?

Stuff like this is neat but always feels a bit like a short-term bandaid.

I'd encourage folks here to check out programs like Egoscue, Alexander Technique, Gokhale method, etc for a more 'holistic' (quotes cuz its such a vague buzzword in health/wellness).

I'm halfway thru Egoscue and it's been amazing for beginning to restore my mobility from when I was a kid, but people should do their own research.

great point! We're working to tie in long term posture restoration programs. What great/different is that you'll actually be able to track your posture improvements over time via the app

Wow, that looks so helpful! Seeing as it is subscription based, do you have a student discount available?

the student discount is coming soon! But we also have a generous discount available now for our launch.

Would it be possible to make a simpler version of this that just find your eyes? You sit/stand up straight once to calibrate it, and then it notifies you of your eyes drop below the calibrated level? All of this AI stuff sounds like hard work.

Seems there’s no way to close the app prior to sign up. Had to kill the processeses

Does this work for Linux?

We don't support Linux yet, but we are working on this!

Glad I scrolled down on the comments feed. The landing page makes no mention of OS supported so I just assumed Linux was a go. Maybe you guys could make that clear.

> ...so I just assumed Linux was a go.

;)

Get it working and I'll try it out!

Could you set up an announce email list so that linux using HNers can sign up to be notified when you have it ready?

I shared an office with a startup doing this in 2005, they still seem to be around.

https://www.posture-minder.com

> I shared an office with a startup doing this in 2005, they still seem to be around.

> https://www.posture-minder.com

Big advantage of that one, for the price of a yearly subscription of this one, you can have a perpetual license for postureminder!

That's really interesting! Thanks for sharing this!

My feedback is: way too difficult to see if it actually works. I have to download the app, install, and sign up? I gave up on your Let’s get started screen.

Looks like Windows only?

We support both Windows and Mac - when you press any of the 'Start my free trial' buttons, the app, for your specific operating system, should start downloading. Let me know if you experience any issues.

I'm on Linux and it downloaded the windows version :)