Bad posture, in particular, a stoop, is a problem for me. It's given me shoulder pain. More recently the stoop has got bad enough to cause balance problems.

I'm too far gone, so I'm told, ever to get a perfect posture. But if I concentrate, I can get close to average. The problem is I can't hold a good posture for long before I "forget" and revert back to a stoop. As I understand it, this leads to a downward spiral: bad posture, less active posture control, weaker muscles, worse posture, and so on.

This suggests that real-time posture feedback would help me. Or, put simply, I need something that buzzes when it detects bad posture. The hope is that not only would I consciously improve my posture, but the use of the muscles would strengthen them, leading to a more long lasting improvement.

I built a prototype. For me, the major, but not only, metric of the bad posture is a reduced distance from waist to neck. To detect this, I tied one side of a pressure sensitive switch to my belt and the other side to a loop around my neck. I adjusted it so that the switch was on unless I was within 1cm of my maximum height. I connected a buzzer to a battery, put them in my shirt pocket, and completed the circuit by attaching them either side of the switch. (The switch was made from two facing screws one fixed, the other moving in a spring. I think an even simpler design would be to take the barrel of a cheap pen, fix a screw in one end. Attach this to your shirt just above the belt with the open end upwards, into which is inserted a heavy nail dangling from a suitably adjusted neck loop.)

I've used it for a couple of hours. It is a strict taskmaster.

I've now looked at the literature. The technique is used for some spinal conditions, but I can't gauge even for these how commonly it's used. Regarding PD, I don't see anything.

It's such an obvious idea that there must be a reason, like it doesn't work or even that it does harm, for it not to be more commonly used.

I'll be grateful for any comments.

John