Smart praying mats are essential to help old and forgetful Muslims perform their religious needs. Due to the binary representation of pressure sensors embedded into the mat for posture identification, existing smart praying systems either use large sensing arrays, thus becoming expensive and bulky, or utilize only a limited number of sensors, minimizing the cost of posture recognition accuracy. This article presents a new technique for detecting human postures and counting posture cycles by a smart mat. Unlike related solutions, the proposed technique identifies postures by voltage levels observed from five sensors only. The technique has been implemented in a prototype smart mat and experimentally evaluated by 30 Islam worshipers. The results show that it provides unobtrusive and robust (100%) recognition of all six postures of the Muslim praying cycle and reliable cycle counting. The implementation is inexpensive, easy to use and quite helpful for users.
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