Review: Lumo Lift - Posture Coach and Activity Tracker

• August 25, 2015
• James Skemp
• review

Works, but Android app leaves much to be desired

I'm a web developer. I sit at my desk for much of the workday and rarely get outside of the building I'm in until the day is done. I've always wondered how bad my posture is, so when I saw the Lumo Lift up for review I decided to give it a try.

After a couple of weeks I've had some good, and some bad, experiences.

First off, the packaging the product is in is definitely not frustration free. They opted to use some fairly strong tape which caused a bit of trouble when detaching the pieces of the Lift.

The Lumo Lift has a base station that is used to power the device. It's not too bad, but it does assume that you have a way to charge it, as it doesn't include a wall charger. I piggybacked off of another device's charger without issue. Not a big deal, since it keeps the packaging compact, but still unfortunate. I think I might have rather had the Lift itself include a USB plug, instead of using a base, however I suppose that could cause issues with sweat seeping into the device.

The next step was to get an app for the device. As I'm on Android I went with the official Android app. Pairing with the device was fairly simple, but for some reason I had difficulties actually using the application. I don't want this review to focus too much on the app, but some of the difficulties I had were with seeing past data (near the end of my first two weeks was when I finally found a way to go back to previous days, despite trying to swipe left/right a few times before then), pulling up the settings, and with syncing issues (it would tell me I had last sync'd days ago).

For the device itself I liked that there are two options for the top magnet, which displays above your shirt. The black and metal gray always stood out, though, and I usually got asked about what they were for.

Activating the Lift via these were pretty simple, and the buzzing was something I would notice, and thought was loud, but when I buzzed it for coworkers they couldn't hear it despite trying to listen for it. It's a powerful buzz that would, for better or worse, interrupt any deep thought I was in while in poor posture. I say better or worse because it would help me fix my posture, but more than once I wanted to break the device as I was deep into something and it kept breaking my concentration. Eventually I took it off and tossed it on my desk, and honestly haven't put it on since.

In addition to the posture tracking it also keeps track of steps (seems to be pretty accurate based on simple tests), which I actually found more interesting after I realized my posture is pretty dang good.

When you connect into the Lumo Lift via the app it does cause it to call home and send off an email (once per day for 2 weeks), sometimes more if you reach milestones, like my six hours of good posture. It is over Bluetooth however, and I'm still not clear on whether it has to always be on (I think it's fine to just connect to it at the end of the day), but if you do you might find like I did that it kills your phone's battery.

So the above said, can I recommend the Lumo Lift?

For me, the breaking of my concentration was the biggest reason I took it off and haven't put it back on. The rather poor app is the second reason. After a few weeks I realized that my posture is generally pretty good, hitting 6 hours of good posture a few times, and most of the time I would get buzzed just a few times over the course of a day. I definitely realized that I lean forward a lot, and in some particular meetings lay back in my chair. Both of these are issues that I knew about, however. The otherwise generally good posture was a nice confidence boost.

So ... I can see myself wearing this for a week every month or so, just to make sure I'm doing well with my posture. The step counting is nice, but given the limited reporting functionality, I wouldn't recommend this device for that.

I think for those reasons I have to give the Lumo Lift - Posture Coach and Activity Tracker a solid 3 of 5 stars. I expected a bit more, so the poor Android app integration was a definite downer, since I would have loved to play with raw data. Perhaps if I had worse posture, was on my feet more, or didn't require some pretty deep thought, I might have found great use from it.

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