People who work in offices often spend many hours a day seated at their desks, those same people, together with people who do not work in an office, then often go home after work and use a home office or surf the Internet for hours. It is the same story with children. This could add up to a lot of bad posture and a lot of bad backs in the near future, especially among today's children, whose bones are still developing and growing.

The fact is simply that many chairs used for office work are either unsuitable or the people who use them do not know how essential it is to adjust their chair to fit their body shape. A good chair, a proper, ergonomic chair, will practically force you to adopt a good posture, which will hugely reduce the chances of you getting an industrial injury. And a bad back caused by an ill-fitting chair would be a work related injury, although it may be thought of as self-inflicted.

Most chairs need to be manually adjusted to suit one's body, which is all very well if you know what the ideal settings ought to be. If you do not well, you could ask your manager to see the health and safety representative. If you work from home, you are on your own. Well, let us put it this way, it is up to you to get the information and apply it yourself. The information is on the Internet. However, you could do away with all that and get a chair that automatically moulds itself to whoever is sitting down in it.

Sounds great, does it not? Very futuristic! In fact, the technology is already here and one of the chairs that has it built in is the Sum chair manufactured by Allsteel. It has won several prestigious awards for its pioneering design and ease of use. The chair boasts an automatically, self-adjusting system called AutoFit. AutoFit is responsible for supplying full support for your back by responding to your sitting position and movements.

You cannot adjust the Sum chair incorrectly because it promises to do the job for you automatically. The arm rests are fully modifiable for width, length, depth and height. This is quickly accomplished and it is helpful if you have to move close to your desk without the arm rests getting in the way.

Another attribute is the Avatar 2, weight-activated tilting mechanism. It will effortlessly, on your behalf, adjust itself to your seating position in one smooth movement. The Sum office chair takes the 'need-to-understand' out of using an office chair correctly.

Since it is self-regulating, it suits an office where several people may sit in one chair during the course of the day and it saves having to train each new employee in the health and safety benefits of good posture and sitting correctly.