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Check out a more detailed post about what we are building here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28278618

We are launching our free beta program. We welcome any/all feedback and periodically host 30-minute Zoom user interviews. As a small token of appreciation for your time, we offer you a $50 Amazon gift card for the interview. Cheers!

Wow, I see so many great use cases

For sure!

The training set used has a lot of diversity. There is no training done on frames of the user - those photos are not stored, process or transferred in any way.

We have users with long hair that covers their ears or users that wear headphones that go over their ears and head and they use the app perfectly fine. One thing that can affect the accuracy of the algorithms is the lighting in the room - poor or extremely strong lighting in some cases can lead to slight inaccuracies.

Zen is a desktop app so I'm happy to see that we satisfy your preference.

Those are great ideas. We'll be adjusting our website to make it more clear!

That's really interesting! Thanks for sharing this!

So far we haven't had people report issues or complain about the app or its performance. We also test the app on laptops ranging from really low range and old laptops to the latest MacBook or Windows laptops and so far we haven't encountered any issues ourselves. Electron has been really useful since it allows us to build apps for different operating systems, hence we can support more users who are looking for a solution like ours.

While we do use the 'posenet' library, this is around 25% of what goes on in the app during a 'posture session' - we need to actually label the multitude of positions that users can be in and we also need to calculate the degree to which users are in those positions. Moreover, we also offer walk breaks, exercise breaks and (ergonomic) educational videos that are really popular among our users.

Thank you for your comment!

That's a really cool idea and I'm curious to see if it can be implemented. However, a lot of people use Zen while working, so I can imagine the tilt can become quite annoying, especially if you're in deep work.

To answer your first question, we constantly improve the computer and mathematical models to improve the accuracy of the 'posture session'. We also offer in-depth analytics about your posture tendencies and also provide and constantly update libraries of exercises and (ergonomic) educational videos. Moreover, we constantly develop new features that users ask for, that are meant to tackle other parts of your wellness while you work (i.e. walk breaks, exercise breaks etc.)

Using a posture correcting garment or brace will actually make your muscles weaker, since they rely on external force to maintain your posture. This is very detrimental long-term and has a negative effect on your back health and overall health. They also don't help you build good posture habits, since you just have good posture while wearing a brace, but when you take it off, you're very likely to have bad posture again.

the student discount is coming soon! But we also have a generous discount available now for our launch.

great point! We're working to tie in long term posture restoration programs. What great/different is that you'll actually be able to track your posture improvements over time via the app

We support both Windows and Mac - when you press any of the 'Start my free trial' buttons, the app, for your specific operating system, should start downloading. Let me know if you experience any issues.

We don't support Linux yet, but we are working on this!

We're delighted to see you've been enjoying Zen. Always more than happy to help!

Thank you! Glad that you're getting value from Zen!