Bluetooth LE personal posture trainer attaches to user’s back and provides body alignment feedback

Nordic Semiconductor today announces that Upright Technologies Ltd, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based health and wellness technology company, has selected Nordic’s nRF52832 Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE) System-on-Chip (SoC) to provide the wireless connectivity for its ‘UPRIGHT GO 2™’ personal posture trainer. 

UPRIGHT GO 2 is affixed to the user’s upper back with a reusable adhesive silicone strip, and employs an accelerometer and a gyroscope. Together these measure the spine’s posture and movement and determine various user states such as ‘straight’, ‘slouch’, and ‘bend’. The device is designed to help the user strengthen back muscles, develop core strength, and improve posture awareness within two weeks, according to the company. 

Once the device is linked to the user’s Bluetooth 4.0 (and later) smartphone using low latency Bluetooth LE wireless connectivity enabled by the Nordic SoC, the user can configure it via the iOS and Android ‘UPRIGHT Posture’ app. The user can then track and train their body alignment by viewing the sensor-derived information in the app. UPRIGHT GO 2 can also deliver a small ‘buzz’ alert via a haptic vibration motor whenever the user’s posture is out of alignment, allowing them to immediately take corrective action.

 

The device achieves approximately 30 hours of battery life per each charge, thanks in part to the ultra-low power characteristics of the Nordic SoC. The nRF52832 has been engineered to minimize power consumption with features such as the 2.4GHz radio’s 5.5mA peak RX/TX currents and a fully-automatic power management system that reduces power consumption by up to 80 percent compared with Nordic’s nRF51 Series SoCs. 

 

Nordic’s nRF52832 multiprotocol SoC combines a 64MHz, 32-bit Arm® Cortex® M4 processor with floating point unit (FPU), with a 2.4GHz multiprotocol radio (supporting Bluetooth 5, ANT™, and proprietary 2.4GHz RF protocol software) featuring -96-dB RX sensitivity, with 512kB Flash memory and 64kB RAM. The nRF52832 SoC is supplied with Nordic’s S132 SoftDevice, a Bluetooth 5-certified RF software protocol stack for building advanced Bluetooth LE applications. The S132 SoftDevice features Central, Peripheral, Broadcaster and Observer Bluetooth LE roles, and supports up to twenty connections. 

 

“We selected Nordic’s nRF52832 SoC for the UPRIGHT GO 2 personal posture trainer due to its combination of cost, functionality, power consumption, and footprint,” says Maayan Tamir Rotem, COO at Upright Technologies. “Battery life is a crucial factor for the success of UPRIGHT GO 2. 

 

“Nordic also provided broad technical information, good support, knowledgeable application engineers, and quick response times.”