Activ Sitting, Inc. — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase I: NHLBI

Description

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The long term goal of this Phase I project is to commercialize an in-home device that facilitates significant levels of ongoing exercise while safely seated, that can enable intuitive engagement by the user, that doesn’t interfere with tasking, reading or other activities, that can significantly reduce sedentary behavior, and that can aggregate and display usage data with biometrics derived from other sources to present an actionable picture of one’s health and remote monitoring of changes in health status. By doing so, we expect to substantially raise compliance to prescribed levels of energy expenditure of a cardiac rehab program. This application requests funds to develop the FitSitt, a highly comfortable chair with a uniquely articulating dynamic seatand back support that actively respond to, follow, and support the userandapos;s movements while integrating a synchronously-moving treadle with which to exercise legs. The technology proposed will transform sitting from sedentariness to movement and exercise and may contribute preventive and ameliorative cardio-metabolic health benefits to a target market of nearly 31 million inactive adults aged 65+ in the US and prolong years of independent living. While cardiac rehab is proven to dramatically reduce mortality and provide important health benefits, it is woefully under-utilized. Sedentary behavior is directly linked to a dramatic rise in chronic disease, but sedentary older adults are not likely to maintain exercise habits, so the approach is for FitSitt to convert a portion of sitting time from sedentary to active, distributed across the day, enabling movement experienced as effortless because it is convenient, easy to use, available, and comfortable. Preliminary studies show that the energy expenditure at a low resistance setting for the current Fitsitt 0.5 is equivalent to walking 1 mph. The primary objective of this project is to complete development of an advanced FitSitt 1.0 prototype, expanding its features to assure safety, increase technical merit and likelihood of feasibility for home use. The specific Aims are: Aim 1a: Engineer/upgrade FitSitt 0.5’s features for optimal in-home maneuverabilityand comfort over extended periods. Aim 1b: Design, then calibrate algorithms to collect use statistics data from on-board sensors. Aggregate, correlate, and calibrate with heart rate data derived from a separate wearable. Aim 2: Validate data collection and calibration, and evaluate usability of combined-feature FitSitt 1.0. Older adults who have experienced a cardiac event within the past 6 months will have unstructured use of the chair in their own homes during a 24- hour period and then complete a user experience interview and rating including a modified System Usability Scale. Plans for Phase II include further refinement of hardware and expansion of software capabilities toward commercialization, and the construction of 10 advanced prototypes for additional and extended user testing over multi-week trials at home. The ultimate goal of this project is to combine into one platform the aggregation of health data with a rehabilitative device which can be used to act on and improve that data through less sedentary living and increased physical activity distributed across the day.This project develops an improved and upgraded prototype of a smart device which provides comfortable, ongoing seated in-home exercise that does not interfere with sedentary activities such as reading or watching TV while it tracks and correlates usage with health metrics. It has been created to enable and fill the need for in-home cardiac rehabilitation opportunities and reduce sedentary behavior with lower-body low-intensity exercise, because spending long periods of time sitting is associated with negative health outcomes including medical conditions that all-too-often follow hospital discharge. The potential benefit is that risk of a subsequent cardiac event is lower, with fewer hours spent sitting sedentary, improving the quality physical health and fitness of older adults, and maintaining independent living for longer periods of time.