I'm a little hesitant to post this given the (understandably) negative response to this patent app by Microsoft, but... ...health and wellbeing software doesn't have to be some big brother system if you're genuinely interested in helping people look after their health at work.
I've developed an award-winning software tool to help computer users look after their health called PostureMinder. It uses a webcam to continually check how you're sitting and provides reminders whenever you sit in a poor posture for a while.
It's based on the principle that we all know how we *should* sit, but very few of us do when we're engrossed in our work or play on the computer. In effect, PostureMinder acts as your posture conscience.
We took the decision very early on not to provide any sort of centralised monitoring or reporting information - PostureMinder's purely standalone and any posture statistics it gathers are there for you to review yourself, not for your boss to look at.
The reason we took this stance is simple - the moment you move away from the principle that the system is *purely* a tool to help you look after yourself, and start diluting that by adding monitoring of employees (even if you did it as a separate version of the software, or as a special for just one client), you lose all trust from people. Perhaps something that Microsoft should bear in mind if they actually develop the sort of product their patent suggests?
If any of you would like to try some health and wellbeing software that's genuinely been built to try to help people, please take a look at our website at http://www.PostureMinder.co.uk. I'd really love to hear your feedback on it.
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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I'm a little hesitant to post this given the (understandably) negative response to this patent app by Microsoft, but...
...health and wellbeing software doesn't have to be some big brother system if you're genuinely interested in helping people look after their health at work.
I've developed an award-winning software tool to help computer users look after their health called PostureMinder. It uses a webcam to continually check how you're sitting and provides reminders whenever you sit in a poor posture for a while.
It's based on the principle that we all know how we *should* sit, but very few of us do when we're engrossed in our work or play on the computer. In effect, PostureMinder acts as your posture conscience.
We took the decision very early on not to provide any sort of centralised monitoring or reporting information - PostureMinder's purely standalone and any posture statistics it gathers are there for you to review yourself, not for your boss to look at.
The reason we took this stance is simple - the moment you move away from the principle that the system is *purely* a tool to help you look after yourself, and start diluting that by adding monitoring of employees (even if you did it as a separate version of the software, or as a special for just one client), you lose all trust from people. Perhaps something that Microsoft should bear in mind if they actually develop the sort of product their patent suggests?
If any of you would like to try some health and wellbeing software that's genuinely been built to try to help people, please take a look at our website at http://www.PostureMinder.co.uk. I'd really love to hear your feedback on it.
Phil