Check your desk posture with a camera

What the check measures, and what it cannot

A camera check estimates how you are sitting from the positions of your ear, shoulder and hip in one frame: forward-head and neck flexion, and how far your torso leans. Those are wellness estimates of your own typical range, not clinical measurements, and nothing here diagnoses anything.

A torso angle the check could not estimate is withheld rather than guessed. On iPhone the check then reports torso lean as not measurable in that capture, while still reporting the neck angle it could see. It is never filed as 0 degrees, which would read as a perfectly upright back.

Android has no such state, and that is not the reassurance it sounds like. Its capture needs both shoulders and both hips in the frame, and without them it does not fall back to a partial reading: the check ends. Android shows Camera unavailable, use manual posture, and opens manual entry instead. Nothing is saved, and the neck angle it could see is not reported either.

The viewpoint decides which of those angles the check can see at all. Forward lean runs towards the camera, so a head-on view cannot observe it.

On iPhone, the camera check card has a Viewpoint choice — Angled ~45°, the default, Side, or Front — and a separate Camera choice between the rear and the front camera. Both are remembered, like the self-timer. Pick where the phone is really standing: the check is filed under the viewpoint you chose, and the saved check's caveat says that you chose it. The camera it records is the one that actually took the picture, which is not always the one you asked for. Choosing Front does not start a check. A head-on view cannot measure forward head, neck or torso angle, and the iPhone check does not derive head-on measurements yet, so the card says so instead of opening the camera.

Since late September 2026, the iPhone also estimates the viewpoint from the capture. Until then, every saved check said that the app had not verified the placement you chose. Now the check compares the width of your shoulders with the length of your torso and estimates front, within about 20 degrees of head-on; side, from about 65 degrees; or angled, in between, each with an approximate number of degrees from head-on. That estimate is part of the caveat on the review screen, before you choose Save, Retake or Discard, and it is saved with the check's caveat. The caveat still records the placement you chose, and the check stays filed under it: the estimate never replaces your choice. When the estimate differs from your choice, the caveat notes the conflict and says the angles were kept at low confidence; a few other things about a capture can lower confidence in the same way. A conflict never blocks a check or rejects it. The caveat says the placement was not verified only when no estimate could be made from the capture. It is an estimate, so keep choosing the placement yourself.

Android offers no viewpoint picker today, so getting the placement right is yours to do. It assumes one placement — the phone propped up and off to your side, at roughly 45 degrees — and files every check as that placement. A check taken head-on is still filed as a 45-degree one, and the forward-head figure it reports is unreliable rather than withheld.

An angled estimate carries a wider uncertainty band than a true side profile would, and the saved check records the viewpoint it was filed under. If two checks disagree, look at where the phone was standing before you read anything into the difference.

This is also not the same signal as the AirPods head-orientation check on iPhone. That one measures the pitch of your head and nothing below it; the camera is the path that estimates neck and upper-body angle. The two stay separate readings with their own labels, and are never added together into a single posture score.

Where the check lives on each app

On iPhone, the posture coach carries a Phone camera check card, and Check posture starts a guided capture: a countdown runs, the screen reads Hold still · taking 3 frames, and the app then takes a short burst and keeps the clearest frame of it. The words appear whatever the Spoken cues setting; only the spoken Hold still depends on it. Since late September 2026, the capture also shows a live camera preview while it runs, with the joints the check has found drawn over you, your ears, shoulders and hips joined by lines, and a readiness line beneath it, such as Looking for you in the camera, Face, shoulders and hip in view, or a hint to change the framing. Checks are started by you and run while the app is open — nothing captures in the background — so the countdown is your window to prop the phone and sit back down normally. Stand it on something steady near chest height; a desk return or a spot beside you works well. No particular distance is required, because none works on every phone: move it back until your head, both shoulders and hips fit.

On Android, the posture card offers Check posture now, and it is not the guided flow the iPhone has. There is no countdown, no preview and no placement prompt: the rear camera takes the frame as soon as you tap. Set the phone where you want it first, so that tapping it is the last thing you do. The schedule toggle beside it reads Deferred and cannot be turned on — scheduled background capture is not available on Android at all, and the card says why.

On the web app, the browser camera check is not available in production, and posture checks run in the iPhone app. Since late September 2026 the production web app has not shown Check posture now. Its Desk posture card, on the logging page, charts your saved posture checks, and until there are at least two to plot it says instead that posture checks run in the iPhone app. The rest of this section, and the next, describe the browser check where it is switched on, which is not the production web app.

There, Check posture now sits on the Desk posture card, and it does not produce a reading. This article used to say the check always ended by reporting the posture model unavailable. Since late September 2026 the check first makes sure the posture model can load and run in this browser, before it asks for your camera. If it cannot — the model could not be loaded, is damaged or is not the expected version, the browser cannot run it, or the posture engine did not start or could not load the model — the message says so, and that the camera was not opened. When that check passes, the browser asks for your camera. A refused camera ends the check with one of the messages described below; a browser with no camera support says Browser camera unavailable; and any other error says Browser posture check failed. With the camera granted, no frame is read, and the check ends with No camera frame was read, so this check produced no data. In every case nothing is saved.

When the browser blocks the camera

This applies only where the browser check is switched on, which is not the production web app. Three different things can refuse a browser camera, they need different responses, and the app often cannot tell which one it is. So it says only as much as it knows, and the opening words of the message on screen are how you tell them apart. Clearing a block does not by itself produce a reading — the browser check reads no frame yet, as above — but it does tell you what, if anything, is yours to fix.

Camera permission denied. A prompt was shown and declined, and the setting that did it is one you can reach. Open this browser's site permissions for this page — in most browsers that is the camera control in the address bar — set the camera to ask or allow, and run the check again.

Camera access was refused. This is the app saying it cannot tell you why, and it means that literally. The camera may be set to block for this site, by you or by whoever manages the machine; or this browser may not let the app read the camera's permission state at all, as Firefox does not. Nothing on screen can establish whether a prompt appeared, so work through the controls in the order the message gives them. This page's site permission first, because that is the one you can change yourself. Then your computer's own camera privacy settings, where your browser has to be allowed. If neither control is available to you, the block is your organisation's device or browser policy, and IT is who to ask.

Camera access is blocked. Here the site permission is not what is saying no — either the browser attributed the refusal to the system, or the camera was already allowed for this page and was refused anyway. Start at your computer's camera privacy settings: Privacy and Security under Camera on a Mac, Privacy settings under Camera on Windows. If your browser is switched off there you can switch it back on yourself, and on a machine nobody else manages that is usually the whole story. Only when that control is missing, greyed out, or has no effect is this your organisation's policy, and then IT is the only place it can be lifted.

The last two messages offer the phone app's posture check as a separate path. That is an offer, not a promise: this page cannot see whether you have the phone app set up, and a desk you cannot leave is awkward for a phone camera check too. Entering posture by hand, below, needs no camera and no permission of any kind — but it is a control the phone apps have and the web app does not, so on this page a refused camera leaves no way to record a posture check today.

What is kept after a check

Only the derived values are kept: the estimated angles, a confidence value, the viewpoint, on iPhone the camera that took the picture, a caveat describing the capture, and when the check ran. On iPhone, since late September 2026, that caveat also carries the estimated viewpoint described above.

The image is not. Pose is estimated on the device that took the frame — your phone, or your own browser — and the frame is discarded as soon as the numbers are read from it. No photo, no video and no landmark set is stored, synced, exported, or sent anywhere, and there is no setting that turns that off.

Whether you get to see a measurement before it is filed depends on the app. On iPhone the check ends on a Save, Retake or Discard choice, so a reading you do not want is discarded rather than filed, and Retake discards it and takes a new check. Android does not work that way: the frame is reduced to numbers, saved to the device and only then shown to you, so there is nothing to decline at that point. Worth knowing before you run a check on Android you are not sure you want: the image is still discarded either way, but the numbers are already filed by the time you read them.

A check deleted while it is still saving says so. Since early October 2026, an iPhone check you delete while it is uploading reports Posture check deleted rather than saved. If its copy in your account could not be removed yet, it says so, the status reads Deleted from this iPhone; not yet from your account, and the app tries again the next time it syncs.

On iPhone you can delete them. Open the Privacy tab and tap Delete phone posture checks under Posture data. After you confirm, every phone camera check is removed from this iPhone and, when you are signed in, from your account, so a reinstall does not bring them back. Posture you entered by hand goes with them: the phone keeps a hand-entered check alongside its camera checks, so this one control removes both, on this iPhone and on your account, and there is no way to keep one kind while deleting the other. If you are not signed in they are removed from this iPhone only, and the screen says so. That control deletes all of them at once. An earlier version of this article said it also removed scheduled checks; iPhone has none, since it shows automatic work-hour checks as Not available on iPhone.

To remove just one, open Delete one check in the same section: it lists camera checks newest first, each named Phone posture check or Desktop camera check, and Delete on a row removes only that check, from this iPhone and, when you are signed in, from your account. The line beneath then says which happened: removed from this iPhone and your account; removed from this iPhone, with a prompt to sign in; removed from this iPhone but not from your account, with a prompt to try again; or removed from this iPhone only, because this iPhone's data belongs to a different account than the one signed in. Posture you entered by hand is not in that list. A check saved from a computer is listed as a Desktop camera check rather than a phone one, and Delete desktop posture, in the same section, removes all of those at once. That would include a check a web browser saved, although the production web app does not run the browser check. The web app and Android have no posture delete control today.

Log posture without the camera

Posture entered by hand counts, and it needs no permission of any kind.

On Android, Log posture manually sits under Check posture now on the same card. On iPhone, the Manual posture reset card offers Log reset, and it is available whenever the camera is skipped, denied, or the capture came back with low confidence. On iPhone, Delete phone posture checks in the Privacy tab removes posture entered this way as well as camera checks.

A denied camera never blocks anything else. Logging a pain episode, writing a note, exporting your data and every chart in the app work exactly the same without it — posture is one optional source among them, not a gate in front of them.