I spent 3 years building a wearable to understand my back pain
Details
- External ID
- 49524381
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I spent 3 years building a wearable to understand my back pain
- Website domain
- notion.site
- Launched
- Sept. 1, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6220095693779905
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:31 a.m.
Description
Hello my name is Rohan Kotecha for the past 2 years I’ve been working on decoding my back pain with wearables which track how my spine moves throughout my life. This is inspired by fatigue from cookie-cutter advice/exercises from each new PT/chiro/osteo I'd see. It was a long journey involving teaching myself PCB design, many nights holed up in factories and hostels in Shenzhen to make cheap prototypes. I wrote up my process/thinking and thought the story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.
Enrichment
- Theme
- habit and daily routine trackers
- Vertical
- Healthcare
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- wearable device for back pain monitoring
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No This is a custom hardware wearable tracking spine biomechanics over several years, requiring embedded systems, sensor fusion, and physical prototyping.
What it would actually take: Requires custom PCB design, ultra-low-power microcontrollers (e.g., Nordic nRF52/53 series), multiple IMU sensor arrays calibrated along the spine, and custom Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) firmware. Building accurate biomechanical spine modeling requires advanced sensor fusion algorithms (Extended Kalman Filters) and physical ergonomic hardware manufacturing. This necessitates multidisciplinary expertise across electrical engineering, firmware development, and biomechanics.
Discussion
9 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: lidocaine patches
Concerns raised: effectiveness varies by body shape/height/posture differences
Feature requests: identify weak back muscles and muscle compensation patterns
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 51 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #20 of 52 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 296 days after the earliest competitor.
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Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.