chaibiker

Before any of this, I'd mostly solved the pain on my own: a standing-height desk and a Hag Capisco, rotating between sitting, standing, and draping one leg up (we call it the flamingo now). It mostly worked and the pain went away and I could do this for hours. But two annoyances never did. Every transition required a conscious interruption prompted by discomfort. By the time I moved, I'd already been static too long.

Here's the problem as we see it. Standing desks, walking, stretching all work, but only if you break focus to do them. In deep work you don't, so you sink into what we started calling the "static valley": long stretches of stillness you didn't choose — breaking flow to move just costs too much. So we buy the most expensive, most adjustable chair we can — just to survive the valley in comfort. The variable that actually tracks with reduced discomfort in the research is how often you change posture, not how good any one posture is.

So the design problem wasn't "add movement", a lot of chairs have done that. It was: allow gross postural change (full stand, one-leg, lean) while keeping the upper body stable enough that your hands and eyes never leave the work. That decoupling is the whole thing. Mechanically: the seat pan is split into two halves, each on a brushless motor; either half drops away on a prompt, and it senses load so it won't drop while bearing weight. Auto-mode nudges a change every 1–10 min. Happy to get into the interaction, control, and the safety system since a chair has to meet a lot of challenging requirements.

On evidence: last time I showed this on HN (2022) the fair criticism was that I said "studies" and couldn't produce one. We had completed the study, but it was not yet peer reviewed and published. Now I can, University of Waterloo, published in Applied Ergonomics (Noguchi et al., 2023). I'll bound it honestly: n=16, 2-hour exposures. The finding was that every participant who became a "pain developer" while standing did not develop pain in our chair, and task performance held. Small study; I won't inflate it. Since then we've shipped, and we're collecting movement data from early users — happy to share what we're seeing.

One key feedback from Waterloo was that all the options our chair introduces may be a challenge. For example, you can always ignore a prompt, and in practice moving becomes automatic enough that almost nobody asks for longer durations (1 of 50+ users so far). But the software always prompts every 10 minutes. I don't know where the line is. Here's another we still chew on: in the study our early chair had a fixed, non-adjustable backrest and it was compared against a Herman Miller Embody, which has a very adjustable back. Ours did better on the pain outcome. I don't fully know what to make of that, except it makes me increasingly skeptical that "lumbar support" is doing what the industry claims. The other thing in our case, it's also not cheap ($2,499).

Last thing- if I can share some credit: our co-founder Andriy and his team in Ukraine got us out of the gate with really good working prototypes in a matter of months — I still don't fully know how they pulled it off (the same team has since moved into Ukraine's drone industry). Alegre Design in Valencia, multiple-award-winners in seating with mobility and electronics experience, was a lucky find for industrial design. Helbling Technik in Bern brought the appliance- and medical-device rigor to get it to a production-ready state that meets long-life and safety standards. Hardware is hard, and it helps to fall in with the right crowd.

Most relevant study I have found is that sitting harm (average sedentary bout lenght & all cause mortality) actually begins at ~10-11m, and increases from that point. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28892811/

"A marked increase in mortality risk was observed at ~10 min/bout; suggestive of a threshold effect."

The fundamental conflict is one of movement vs. focus (and health vs. career sadly), and we have found a way to introduce significant posture changes while doing work. https://www.movably.com/

We, also unlike basically every other chair company sadly, also put this to an independent research group. Our protocol was a simple sit-stand transition every 3 minutes, and the seems to be the first study to show a chair preventing pain without interrupting productivity. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...

My guess is today's recommendations to move every 30m/45m or so were a compromise between ergonomists and employers given more frequent interruption was not practical in the workplace.

In our study 100% of participants reported no discomfort even compared to high end ergonomic chair. Aside from what our chair does it does show how impactful more frequent posture changes can be. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...

Our thought is if we can also build significant posture changes (sit-stand) more easily into the workday it can help a lot, and our first study showed this dramatically.

We just launched on Indiegogo here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/movably-pro-the-freedom-o...

We did the simplest study that surprisingly chair makers don’t do- can you prevent pain. Our chair prevented discomfort for 100% of participants compared to a high end ergonomic chair.

More here: https://www.movably.com/

If curious, on the latest in sitting, standing, perching, alternating, a good overview recently from University of Waterloo: https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-of-research-expertise-for-the-pr...

Got beat up a bit here originally- didn't have the science to share to back up our claims. Now we do, moving regularly prevents back pain & can be easy and without impacting desk work productivity. Study report: https://www.movably.com/_files/ugd/ba4f7a_ee962b83d95e4c47a4...

Had a cycling accident years ago, became much more sitting intolerant afterward, probably made me quit coding as a career.

Have been testing prototypes for a year, people have done hours long stretches on a 2-3 min interval feeling no pain or stiffness at the end. A study showed the same strong results.

Website: https://www.movably.com/ Early user review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUjkbMc_xBw&t=1s

And yes, we do need to reshoot those photos, you are absolutely right. Arms need to be closer to 90 degrees, top of screen at about eye level would put it in the right position.

Everyone absolutely should be skeptical. I have tried a lot of chairs, the most recent which allowed me to re-position most was the Hag Capisco. But to some extent it still would interrupt focus. I have also found almost no research studies showing effectiveness of ergonomic chair designs, but would love pointers to any others that may exist.

I am one of the founders at https://www.movably.com/. If you work at a desk for extended periods you may have heard the call to “move more” or that "the best posture is your next posture". The problem is we also have to get our work done. That’s what we are solving with our smart interactive chair.

Research shows that moving more often is one of the most effective ways to prevent the health problems caused by sitting. So we set out to create a way to incorporate healthy frequent movement that is easy to adopt without interrupting your work or flow.

Here is a short video to give you an idea https://youtu.be/d0D3-YBj7Zo. Test users have loved it, they usually have the “aha” moment within the first day no longer feeling sore from sitting. We also ran a formal research study with University of Waterloo (who work on chairs/sitting a lot) testing with people who show early signs of discomfort in sitting and standing with really good results- all the participants reported no pain when using Movably when compared to standing or sitting in a high end ergonomic chair. That will be published soon as one of the first times a chair was able to help prevent back pain.

Would love to get your feedback and questions!

Thank you, Mark