Imagine that you’re sitting at your desk, working on a spreadsheet. That’s when you feel a vibration in your hands. Then you see a subtly glowing light. And you realize it’s nearly noon, and you’ve been sitting all morning. So you touch the light. Your desk raises to standing level. And you ditch your chair.

This is the vision of Herman Miller’s Live OS. It’s a subscription service that links to its new line of sensor-laden tables and chairs and can see how employees are using them. Live OS can do anything from alerting the end user that it’s time to stand, to spotting frequently uninhabited desks, to helping a company make its footprint more efficient.

Basically, it’s built to please employees at the micro comfort level, and their bosses at the macro organizational level. “The team kept saying human-centered, enterprise-ready,” explains Ryan Anderson, director of commercialization and business development at Herman Miller. The project has been in development since 2013, and Herman Miller tapped five design firms to bring various pieces of the project to fruition, including Yves Béhar’s Fuseproject. But Anderson stresses that Herman Miller has been thinking about sensors in the workplace for much longer, citing an internal study on wearables from way back in the year 2000.

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