Monitoring Lower Back Activity in Daily Life Using Small Unintrusive Sensors and Wearable Electronics in the Context of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases

Abstract

Due to a sedentary lifestyle, the amount of people suffering from musculoskeletal back diseases has increased over the last few decades. To monitor and cure these disabilities, sensors able to monitor the patient for long-term measurement during daily life and able to provide real-time feedback are required. There are only a few wearable systems that are capable to acquire muscle activity (sEMG) and posture at the same time. Moreover, previously reported systems do not target back sensor and typically comprise bulky uncomfortable solutions. In this paper, we present a new wearable sensor network that is designed to measure muscle activity and posture specialized for back measurement. Special care was taken to propose a discrete and comfortable solution. The prototype only measures 3.1 mm in thickness on the spine, making this sensor system the thinnest and lightest one in the literature to our best knowledge. After testing, it was shown that the sensor system is able to acquire two surface electromyography signals concurrently, to gather acceleration and rotation speed from the patient’s lower back, and to transmit data to a computer or a smartphone via serial communication or Bluetooth low energy for a few hours for later processing and analysis.

Low-Cost Wireless Wearable System for Posture Monitoring

“…The sensor weight is approximately 3 g. Its response time is less than 10 ms, its recovery time is less than 15 ms, and the operating temperature range is from −20 wearable sensors that can be integrated in different platforms such as chairs or clothes. Many embedded systems based on this concept have been reported in literature, but research activity is still ongoing and aims at lowering the systems' cost and increasing accuracy and users' comfort [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. A systematic review with respect to wearables for assessing spine kinematics and kinetics is available in [21].…”

Initial study on an expert system for spine diseases screening using inertial measurement unit

“…An interesting study is included in the 78 where Authors use a set of small unintrusive sensors to detect rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases. Authors focus specifically on the lower back area and use 3 horizontally placed sensors to acquire relevant measurements.…”

Ergon-Novel Ergonomics for Neck Discomfort - An Easy & Affordable Solution

“…However, due to the novelty of this field and unavailability of datasets and information on sensor development done by previous researches, most effort is still directed towards the development of the measuring method and accuracy. Thus, the integration of the sensors into a complete system as well as aspects like comfort, aesthetics and wearability are undergoing a process of evolution [5,6,7,8].There has been multiple previous work done for the same we have tried out [9][10][11].…”