This smart cushion will tell you if you're too stressed or slouching

We’ve seen plenty of wearable gadgets that keep an eye on your daily activity, vital stats and even stress levels, but with Darma, a smart cushion, you only need to sit on it to find out more about your body throughout the day.

The Darma cushion is only 1mm thin and detects tiny movements in your body through a series of sensors. These sensors then feed data back to the Darma’s iOS app via Bluetooth, which will tell you what your heart rate is, give you more information about your respiratory pattern and posture.

However, the app doesn’t just tell you all of the things you’re doing wrong, but it also serves up advice about how to calm down if you’re stressed, change your posture if you’re slouching or take up another activity if your breathing seems all out of sync. Like many similar tracking devices, the Darma allows you to record your activity over longer periods, so you can see whether you’re improving and what steps brought about positive changes.

According to Engadget, Darma is still in the early stages of development and will become a Kickstarter project at some point over the next few months, but we think it has huge potential in office environments. Sure you may already know you slouch a bit and get stressed out, but maybe seeing data presented in a really explicit way will force you to change your habits? Or maybe it’s up to employers to buy Darmas for their whole company in order to reduce stress levels and in turn reduce the amount of sick days people take?

Let us know what you think of the ideas behind the Darma in the comments below.