Nursing staff are often exposed to physical strain in their day-to-day work, which can lead to long-term health problems due to incorrect posture. This contributes significantly to sickness-related absences in an already highly stressed occupational field. In order to counteract these developments, it is necessary to raise awareness of ergonomically correct working practices at an early stage - ideally during training. This is where PostureCare comes in with an innovative, practical training approach.

The PostureCare project aims to develop an interactive training system that recognises harmful postures in nursing practice at an early stage, provides feedback and thus prevents them. The system is to be used specifically in the training and further education of nursing staff in order to promote ergonomically correct working in the long term.

A combination of mixed reality (MR) technology and sensor-supported biofeedback is used for implementation:

• Mixed reality (MR): care activities with high stress potential are realistically simulated in a virtual training environment. Compared to traditional skills labs, this enables location-independent, cost-efficient training with a high level of immersion.
• Physical props: Real objects (‘physical props’) are used for particularly stressful acute situations - such as transferring patients - to ensure realistic physical strain.
• Sensor shirt: During execution, the posture and strain on the spine are recorded in real time via a sensor shirt. Ergonomically unfavourable movements or incorrect posture are recognised immediately and reported directly to the user.