An adaptive cushion method and apparatus (20) for minimizing forces on bodyparts of a person on a chair or bedincludes an overlay cushion (21) having a plurality of individual air bladdercells (22), each having thereon a novel stretchablepiezoresistive force sensor(33), and an electro-pneumatic control system (20A)for inflating and deflating individual cells topres-sures measured by a transducer (44). Force concentrations sensed by theforce sensors are minimized using a novel algorithm byvarying the inflation pressure in a first cell while measuring the sum of theforces exerted on all cells, repressurizing the first cellto that pressure for which a minimum total force was obtained, repeating thecyclical variation in pressure and re-inflation to aminimum force-obtaining pressure for each of the remaining cells, andrepeating the sequence for all cells until the forcevaria-tions are minimized below a predetermined threshold value.
