I'm an emeritus professor in the Department of Surgery here at the University of Vermont, and I'm the CEO of QOR360, a company that makes active chairs.

Our standard office chairs are predicated on a misunderstanding.

Office chair designers have, for the last hundred years, believed that people are unable to sit without being propped up all day long.

And so we get the backrest, the armrest, the footrest, the headrest, and the coup de gras lumbar support.

The lumbar support is here trying to establish the normal lumbar curve, which is lost when people sit in standard office chairs.

Without lumbar support, people find themselves falling into a slump in front of their computer.

Terrible posture for the spine, because the spine is designed to have its normal lumbar lordosis curve.

In order to reestablish that curve, office chairs have built-in lumbar support.

Something that pushes the small of the back forward in a very unnatural posture, trying to approximate what normal human standing posture looks like.

It's been a massive failure, because if you've ever tried to sit against the lumbar support of your chair, you'll find that it's extremely uncomfortable.

And so most people sit forward from the lumbar support and slump, as they would anyway.

We have a fundamentally different idea about how sitting should work.

We believe people should use the natural architecture of their bony skeleton to support themselves.

Humans have been doing this for 3 million years, and we can continue to do it for another 3 million years.

We use a chair that is unstable and allows the spine to move while people sit.

When people sit on something that's unstable, they immediately establish their normal lumbar lordosis, really without even thinking about it.

So rather than trying to establish this normal curve of the back by pushing with an external support, our chairs allow people to find the natural lumbar lordosis merely by exploring the space of possible ways to sit until they land on the natural posture that they've used for 3 million years.