The UpRight Go 2 is Out… With the Problems of the Original

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The Upright Go is a small wearable device that helps you improve your posture. Slouching is an epidemic. Thanks to phones, doctors are seeing an increase in the number of patients they see with back and neck problems. I’m typing this right now with an incredibly stiff neck that I should absolutely see a doctor about.

So, a few months ago, I got an Upright Go, to help me improve my posture. It, generally speaking, worked. My posture did improve. But the gains are easy to lose, and, if you don’t keep up with it at least once a week, you’re going to start slouching again.

As for my neck pain, I think it’s my pillow.

Anyway, I had a number of problems with this device. Some of those problems have been addressed in the new version. Some, but not all. But do the improvements make it a device looking into? Perhaps.

The Problems with the Original

I don’t really use my Upright Go anymore. I had a back problem, likely due to long flights and sitting poorly in my hotel room, but it could have been due to the additional strain I put on my back by using this. So I stopped. Still, here are the problems I’m sure the Upright Go had.

Adhesives

The Upright Go sticks to your back using these rubbery adhesive strips. The strips are supposed to last a few days, and they say you can clean them with alcohol to ensure they last longer. You can’t. Cleaning off the fuzz after a few days with the included alcohol pads just makes them stick worse. The adhesives lasted me about two full days. I could never get a full third day of use out of them. That means you’d buy adhesive packs often. They come with 10 in a pack, and, at full price, cost $10 (though they’ve almost always been on sale, currently they’re $7). You’d spend about $30 every two months if you used this every day. The device itself is $100!

The adhesives do actually last those full two days, but might not if you’re active or sweating a lot, so you could have to buy even more. This is a problem that could be solved quite simply. Add a clip. Let people clip it on their shirt collars or, for women, our bras. But you know why the company doesn’t do that. They want that ongoing revenue of an adhesives subscription service. The problem is, this is such an obvious inconvenience with such an obvious solution that no one would buy into that. People know they’re getting ripped off, and Upright just looks scummy for doing this.

Battery Life and Slow Charging

The Upright Go is a device you have to charge every day. It’ll last 8-10 hours on a charge. You’ll want to charge it overnight as well. This isn’t like your AirPods, where you can get decent use out of a short charge. It takes hours to fully charge. Forget to plug it in over night, and you’ll have to charge it for a few hours during your work day the next day.

Poor Tracking

The device switches between two modes, training and tracking. If you’re training, every time you slouch it’ll buzz. This buzz is incredibly annoying, but you can set it to be a more gentle tap, which I found makes you less likely to yank it off.

However, let’s say you want to track how this improves your posture over time. Maybe you’re writing a review of the Upright Go? You’d want to be able to easily see the percentage of slouching you did while it wasn’t reminding you to sit straight. You’d want a graph to track your progress. The Upright Go app won’t let you do that. It won’t let you export your data either. I found that if you email customer service you can request your data and graph it out yourself, but this is time consuming, not something you’d want to do daily.

It’s as though they don’t believe in their own product.

Allowed You to Slouch if You Leaned Back

This was something I found funny. There’s only one accelerometer in this, and it doesn’t care if you lean back. So, you could lean back in your chair or on your couch, slouch forward, and it wouldn’t register your slouch. You could still have poor posture and this would report perfect posture.

Lead to Back Pain

I’m not referring to the back pain that I likely got from that lousy hotel chair and hours of flights. No, the back pain I’m referring to was muscular. As it turns out, if you’re a serial sloucher, like me, you really shouldn’t overdo your posture training. You should allow yourself a lot of slouch time in your first week or two. It’s like running, you don’t get into it by doing a 10K. The app, to its credit, warns you of this. But if you’re like me, you tend to push yourself hard. The app’s really not good at keeping you from this behavior. You could easily have the trainer on all day.

Often, a personal trainer’s job isn’t just to push you harder, it’s to tell you to take a break.

Can’t Auto-Detect Activity

This was one of the most frustrating features. I could be at my desk, writing, as I am now. Then, I remember I have to do dishes and take out the trash. So, I get up to do that. When your hands are soapy and wet, it’ll suddenly start buzzing, and it won’t stop. Your Upright Go couldn’t detect that you were moving around and more active now. It couldn’t tell that it needed to stop tracking. Even with only one accelerometer, this should be easy enough to track.

App Problems

I often found the app would become unresponsive and require a complete restart. Often, that would mean re-syncing the Upright Go. Furthermore, popup windows will block controls you need access to, and you won’t be able to dismiss them. It took months of being bothered by the buzzing before I found the setting that allows me to reduce the annoyance of the device.

The Good Stuff

Ease

Slap this on your back, press a button, and set it up on the app. It’s really easy to get started with this. Unlike most fitness devices, you just get up and start using it. Really have to give them credit for that. The settings on the app can be a little poor, and the app itself is far from perfect, but it’s generally something you can set and forget.

Comfort

And forgetting the Upright Go is easy. When it’s not buzzing on your back, it’s incredibly comfortable. You’ll forget your wearing it, usually. I had an itch on my back and almost scratched it off once, forgetting it was stuck to my back. Generally speaking, once you stick it on, you’ll forget all about it.

Improves Posture

It works. Listen, all criticisms aside, if you have bad posture and neck or back pain, you should definitely do something about it. You could get posture trainer clothing that wraps around your body, forcing your shoulders back and your back into alignment, but that’s going to be extremely uncomfortable, especially if you’re a woman wearing it over your bra.

Compared to every other way of improving your posture, the Upright Go is the least frustrating or uncomfortable. It’s incredibly flawed, and someone could easily make a far better device, but the market isn’t very competitive right now. Though it could easily be beaten by a similar device with more intelligent tracking and a clip, it’s still the best way to track and improve your posture.

Well, it was.

Upright Go 2

Improvements

The new Upright Go 2 is smaller than the previous version, making it even less noticeable. Still, it’s wider, 40% wider. This increases the adhesive area. You might be able to make the adhesives last three days on this! It has multiple sensors to improve posture tracking, though Upright doesn’t say how they’ve used these additional sensors to improve tracking. It also has a 3x improved battery life. 30 hours! That’s likely enough to last you two days.

Problems

The first and most obvious one is the lack of a clip. I just want to clip this to my bra and forget it’s there. I don’t want to spend $20-$30 every few months just to sit up. That’s an absurd price for some pieces of adhesive.

The app also is unchanged, judging from their promotional video. That means it’ll still suffer from unresponsive software, poor UI design, no long-term tracking, and the ability to fool it by leaning back in your chair. There’s also no mention of automatic shut off for training mode when you get out of your chair to go exercise or do chores.

Should You Buy It?

The Upright Go 2 is definitely a better device than the Upright Go. But it’s still not perfect. My advise would be to use it every day for a month, then maybe only on the week days for the second month, and by the third, only once or twice a week. By doing that, you can train your posture over time, and you won’t spend so much on adhesives. But expect to add at least $30 to the purchase price for adhesives. You also may mess up those adhesives a bit, and you’ll want ot continue tracking over many months. This is likely a $150 investment.

If you’re okay spending that money, give it a shot. It will improve your posture, your back strength, and your health. Plus, an added benefit people tend not to think about when it comes to posture? You’ll look better. It will make you more attractive. Really. Sitting up straight is more attractive.

Should you buy it? If the cost is okay, there’s really no better way to improve your posture. Someone could easily disrupt this industry. I had hoped Apple would do it. If Apple added gyroscopes to their AirPods, they could easily replace this entire device with something far less annoying and actually more cost effective. Plus, Apple would then track the results of your training in the Health app, so you’d have better tracking to boot. Finally, it would track your neck movements, which means it could help you avoid neck injuries. Upright survives because no one has made a better tracker, though they’ve set the bar low. It’s your best bet right now though, so if you want to improve your posture, yes, you should buy it.  And if the cost is a bit high, you can get the original Upright Go for $80, though I recommend getting the newer one, as the adhesives will last longer.