Abstract
The activities performed by nurses in their daily activities involve frequent forward bending and awkward back postures. These movements contribute to the prevalence and development of low back pain (LBP). In previous studies, it has been shown that modifying their posture by education and training in proper lifting techniques decreases the prevalence of LBP. However, this education and training needs to be implemented daily. Hence, implementing the use of a wearable device to monitor the back posture with haptic feedback would be of importance to prevent LBP. This paper proposes a wearable device to monitor the back posture of the user and provide feedback when the participant is performing a possible hurtful movement. In this study, a group of participants was asked to wear the device while performing three of the most common activities performed by nurses. The study was divided into three sessions: In the first session, the participants performed the activities without feedback (baseline). During the second session, the participants received feedback from the wearable device (training) while performing the three tasks. Finally, for the third session, the participants performed the three tasks again, but the haptic feedback was turned off (validation). We found an improvement in the posture of more than 40% for the pitch (lateral bending) and roll (forward/backward bending) axes and 7% for the yaw (twisting) axis when comparing to the results from session 1 and session 2. The comparison between session 1 and session 3 showed an overall improvement of more than 50% for the pitch (lateral bending) and roll (forward/backward bending) axes and more than 20% for the yaw axis. These results hinted at the impact of the haptic feedback on the participants to correct their posture.
Highlights
Low back pain (LBP) is ranked sixth in terms of the overall burden of disease worldwide [1]
While little is known about the development of LBP between adolescence and early professional life [3], there is a high development of LBP in adults
It has been proven that among health workers, nurses are at higher risk of having LBP or spine injuries [10,11,12,13]
Summary
Low back pain (LBP) is ranked sixth in terms of the overall burden of disease worldwide [1]. The World Health Organization recently stated that “musculoskeletal conditions are the leading contributor to disability worldwide, with low back pain being the single leading cause of disability globally” [2]. It has been proven that among health workers, nurses are at higher risk of having LBP or spine injuries [10,11,12,13]. This could be explained by the fact that nurses are daily involved in activities such as patient handling and repositioning, as well as many tasks involving bending, twisting, pushing, and pulling [3,8,11,12,13,14]. The topic of LBP is extremely difficult to study since the causes for LBP are unclear and are rarely directly linked to a definitive issue or condition [7,9,10,15]
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