The Influence of the Schoolbag on Standing Posture of First-Year Elementary School Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of the mass of a schoolbag on standing posture in first-year elementary school children. First-year elementary school students (n = 76) participated in this study. The data was digitized and analyzed using SkillSpector and Kinovea. Results have shown a change of Center of Gravity (COG) position in all three anatomical planes (p < 0.01), as well as a change in two out of three measured postural angles—craniovertebral (p < 0.01) and craniocervical (p < 0.01) angle. The most important aspect of changed posture, anterior shift of COG, was measured to be 2.4 cm and was in moderate negative correlation with student body mass (−0.4, p < 0.01) and height (−0.4, p < 0.01) when students were encumbered with a schoolbag weighing 16.11% of their body mass, on the average. Also, this study confirms that when encumbered, students’ head posture shifts to a more protracted position.

Accuracy and reliability of a low-cost methodology to assess 3D body posture based on commercial cameras and Excel templates

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“…3D optoelectronic motion capture (OMC) systems are not used by physical therapists and other healthcare specialists due to time required for testing, their expensive price and for the data analysis time cost, which sometimes requires the use of an additional biomechanics software (such as Visual 3D). There are free solutions to perform this type of analysis such as Check 3D (Sheffield University, UK) [1] or SkillSpector (Video4coach, Denmark) [2,3]. Check 3D is a software that allows to perform the camera calibration using a chessboard; subsequently, the 2D coordinates in pixels are digitized in two cameras and the software provides a comma-separated values (CSV) file with the 3D coordinates of the markers.…”