Back pain? This app uses your webcam to detect bad posture

Take Amazons launch in the US last year of AI-powered cameras in its Prime delivery vans, which it said would be used to assess driver safety but which critics instantly dubbed Orwellian surveillanceIn short, AIs with eyes can just feel, er, function creepy.Zen says its taken a privacy centric approach to building this webcam-based posture correcting tech meaning its taken some specific steps to try to reassure users theyre not being watched by it or anyone else as the AI watches them.Firstly, its posture correction software is open source (the code is here on Github). We use open source software for the entire app, except our exercise and educational content, which we custom make, notes James when as asked about that.The AI also processes data locally, on device which means it does not require an internet connection to function so he says users can verify for themselves that its not uploading/streaming any data to the cloud by testing it with their wi-fi/internet connection disabled.The posture correction software feature runs offline, without internet, without recording or storing visuals, he emphasizes. James has a personal reason to be keen on keeping good posture, having been a very active NCAA Division-One college football player at Yale University who then went on to working at Adobe in San Francisco and living the typical sedentary corporate lifestyle of sitting in front of a computer for over eight hours a day which eventually led to him developing serious low back pain and carpal tunnel. There was a lucky strike too: His co-founder, Alex Secara who was his housemate at the time and is now Zens CTO had already developed a posture correction software for himself in college to help with a spine-related condition he has (kyphosis) which had also been exacerbated after long hours of coding during tech internships. Expanding into selling physical products (more ergonomic chairs, mice, keyboards etc) is also on its roadmap, per James, who says its also looking to explore whether it can make use of existing movement sensor hardware in devices like more high end headphones, wearables and mobiles to see if it could repurpose those signals for determining if a person is slouching or not.