Lumo Lift: A Weirdly Welcome Device for Office Life

As more and more people spend their days working sedentary jobs (especially designers, illustrators, and other creative-types), we’re more pressed to find ways around the wrist and back pain, fix our posture, and get some much-needed vitamin D throughout the day. Slouching in particular is sneaky; you might be sitting up straight when you get to work but by the end of the day you’re hunched over your desk like a Quasimodo in training.

Enter Lumo Lift—a device designed to keep you from slouching at your desk. You attach it to your clothes, align it with the correct posture, and for specified periods of time it will literally buzz you if you start to slouch. It doesn’t zap you like a dog’s bark collar might, the buzz is akin to a cell phone’s vibrate. It’s just enough to alert you without being a distraction, and then you pick your shoulders up. Even when it’s not in coaching mode, it keeps track of your posture throughout the day and gives you a report.

The device also acts as a pedometer, giving you a much more accurate reading than the pedometer on your phone (you might not take your phone everywhere around the house, but Lumo goes with you). The initial goal is 10,000 steps per day, but that’s pretty tough to achieve when you work a desk job.

I tried Lumo Lift for a week, and found that I walk a pathetic 1,737 steps per day. That’s pretty depressing, it’s less than a mile. On Monday I took only 514 steps, but throughout the week I was more and more aware of how little I was moving and by Friday I was taking 2,251 steps (better, but, still pretty bad). I resolved to start walking to lunch.

The posture coach was the most interesting part—you slouch without meaning to. I bite my lip when I’m anxious, and apparently my shoulders dip when I do that. The device started buzzing me for all kinds of bad behavior, like slouching or checking my phone. At the end of a week, I felt refreshed and my back ached less than it had been.

By: PasteMagazine