The chair version will work with any user and should be as low cost as possible so that it will be installed on a high scale on any possible chair. Alternatively, if the chairs are dedicated per person they may provide insight on time spend on each chair, like at work, at home or in the car.

I started doing some experiments with an ultrasonic distance sensor. As it turns out, it is not the ideal thing to use: this particular version requires 5V and quie a lot of power, but it will do for the time being, as proof of concept.

The circuit is build around an XMEGA32E5 one some header board, with an attached ESP8266 and your tipical HC-SR04 ultrasonic ranging module, nothing special. It is not optimised for power consumption in any way so it will burn a charge of batteries in 3-4 days. For now, it simply uploads the data to emoncms on my website, similar to Led logger V3.

As it turns out, putting the sensor on the top of the chair is not a good idea: some fabrics seem to be pretty bad at reflecting ultrasounds and crouching does not detect the person.

Next up, i mount this sensor between the seat and back of the chair. It is a delicate position, as a bit higher or lower will cause the sensor to pick up the cushions as obstacles. However this seems to work a lot better, usable with all the types of pants that i have. (well a long wool sweater will still break the thing).

Conclusion on ultrasonic: might work, delicate to place, large. The high voltage and high power consumption may be managed to get decent battery life.