Abstract
Background
The clinical assessment of Chronic Low Back Pain (CLBP) is usually undertaken at a single time point at clinic rather than through continuous monitoring. To address this, a wearable prototype sensor to monitor motion of the lumbar spine and pelvis has been developed.
Sensor Development, Testing and Results
The system devised was based on inertial sensor technology combined with wireless Body Sensor Network (BSN) platform. This was tested on 16 healthy volunteers for ten common movements (including sit to stand, lifting, walking, and stairs) with results validated by optical tracking.
Preliminary findings suggest good agreement between the optical tracker and device with mean average orientation error (°) ranging from 0.1 ± 2.3 to 4.2 ± 2.6. The sensor repeatability errors range from 0 to 4° while subject movement variability ranged from 4% to 14%. Parameters of angular motion suggest greater movement of the lumbar spine compared to the pelvis with mean velocities (°/s) for lumbar spine ranging from 15.3 to 74.13 and pelvis ranging from 5.6 to 40.74. Further analysis revealed the extent to which the pelvis was engaged, as a proportion of the total movement. This demonstrated that the pelvis underwent smooth transitions from low (0.02), moderate (0.4) to high (0.99) use during different movement phases.
Conclusion
A wearable sensor has been developed to record and quantify lumbar and pelvic movement. This permits an understanding of the lumbo-pelvic relationship to be characterized in an objective way during daily tasks. The next stage of the project will involve testing with CLBP patients.
Conflicts of interest: None
Sources of funding: Partly funded by Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity and Westminster Medical School Research Trust
We confirm that this abstract has not been previously published in whole or substantial part nor has it been presented previously at a national meeting.
