I'm Mark, one of the founders. Years ago I fractured a vertebra (L2) in a bike accident and afterward couldn't sit as long without pain. I went through a range of "ergonomic" chairs and slowly realized they were all solving the wrong problem. Chairs compete to be the most comfortable single position to settle into for you, when the thing actually hurting me was staying in any one position. It wasn't just me: my cofounder Jose herniated his L5-S1 years earlier and had ended up in the same place, improvising movement however he could to get through the workday.
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 We had completed the study, but it was not yet peer reviewed and published.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.
We are working on this and did a related study which included a group of participants more sensitive than average to standing and sure enough- more frequent posture changes from standing eliminated discomfort in 100% of participants. If curious: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
Have not seen any scientific backing for this Cornell recommendation 20m sit duration.
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."
We have been working on a better solution to this the last few years and have a good answer if extended desk work focus is integral to your work.
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...
We are just launching something related. Basically the harm from static sitting actually begins at around 10-12 minutes and builds from there. The more often you can interrupt it before that the better, but of course that also starts impacting productivity. There are also many sitting health impacts from muskuloskeletal to metabolic and these kinds of studies might show benefit in some areas but aren't testing everything.
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.
Yep, for deskwork. We shouldn’t sit for extended periods of time, but moving is usually too interrupting. We pair with a standing height desk and make it trivially easy to change posture every few minutes without disturbing your focus.
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.
Hi, Would love to find someone interested in taking on the consumer marketing side of our project, while we develop dealer channels and corp direct sales. Sitting is killing us. What we need is a way to move more often during the workday without interrupting our focus. Movably’s smart interactive chair makes it super easy to move often while working. Our study gets published soon- the first chair ever to prevent pain in an independent study. https://www.movably.com/ Write mark at domain.
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...
The Capisco was the last chair I had before diving into this and it actually worked pretty well. I mostly alternated legs, with one standing while the other was draped on the chair. The only drawback was the friction of repositioning and I think the trick is to minimize friction so frequent movement is easy.
Interesting, that fit's one of the lines of research on disc health because the disc are nourished indirectly mostly through the porous vertebrae, it takes motion to create the pressure variations to facilitate blood flow. This may be why most active chairs don't move the needle enough, the motion is both limited and usually only triggered when a person is prompted to move by discomfort.
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.