Your Chair is Watching You

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

QMULs Sophie Skach is interested in both textiles and computers. In a recent summer project she explored how much your chair could tell about you. When sitting talking, we change postures a lot, and maybe that gives vital clues to what is actually happening when groups of people are talking. By embedding sensors in the fabric of a chair, perhaps it can tell something about the social roles involved - who is dominant in the conversation, who is passive, who is speaking, who is listening, who isn’t. Intelligence starts with being able to sense the world, so sytems like this may one day help make computers more intelligent, making it easier for them to work out, unobtrusively, the nuances of what we humans are up to.

One day soon your chair may be keeping an eye on you!