Sounds like you're using machine learning & computer vision. How much diversity is in your training set? I can see obesity, skin tone, and gender playing a role in this. Or, is it entirely trained on photos of the user? Even so... I see you're looking for users' ears. Can it cope with ears hidden by hair, or chunky earrings that change daily?
Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#32Sounds like you're using machine learning & computer vision. How much diversity is in your training set? I can see obesity, skin tone, and gender playing a role in this. Or, is it entirely trained on photos of the user? Even so... I see you're looking for users' ears. Can it cope with ears hidden by hair, or chunky earrings that change daily?
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.
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#33Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#34My feedback is: way too difficult to see if it actually works. I have to download the app, install, and sign up? I gave up on your Let’s get started screen.
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#35Seems there’s no way to close the app prior to sign up. Had to kill the processeses
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#36Sounds like you're using machine learning & computer vision. How much diversity is in your training set? I can see obesity, skin tone, and gender playing a role in this. Or, is it entirely trained on photos of the user? Even so... I see you're looking for users' ears. Can it cope with ears hidden by hair, or chunky earrings that change daily?
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 str…
Sorry if I am not understanding but you say the photos of user are not processed but aren’t the frames from the webcam stream processed to extract data about the users posture?
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it.
For sure!
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#38Would it be possible to make a simpler version of this that just find your eyes? You sit/stand up straight once to calibrate it, and then it notifies you of your eyes drop below the calibrated level? All of this AI stuff sounds like hard work.
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#39[deleted]
Re: Launch HN: Zen (YC S21) – Posture-correcting software via webcam
#40Hi Alex and Daniel! This looks really cool and I believe I am in your set of target customers/potential early adopters. Personally, I'd much moreso prefer a self-hosted option such as a desktop application with strong guarantees about limits on cloud upload over anything cloud-based for this use case, specifically around concerns about how the webcam data could be used/abused. I don't see any immediate FAQ page or so…
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!
Yeah, no.
* If I click on the web site, there is no privacy policy given. It just links back to the front page (Chrome)
* Anything with a subscription has got to send some data somewhere.
* All the language about "privacy-centric" with on actual background looks really sketchy.
Would you trust a small, unknown company to have access to your web cam? My experience is that few enough companies follow their own privacy policies.