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Development of wearable posture monitoring system for dynamic assessment of sitting posture

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Abstract

There have been increasing cases of people seeking treatment for neck and back pain. The most common cause of neck and back pain is due to long-term poor sitting posture. The most common poor sitting posture cases are humpback, and head and neck being too far forward. It is easy to cause neck and back pain and other symptoms. Therefore, the development of wearable posture monitoring system for dynamic assessment of sitting posture becomes both helpful and necessary. In addition to recording the wearer’s posture when sitting with quantitative assessment, it is needed to execute real-time action feedback for correctness of posture, in order to reduce neck and back pain due to long-term poor sitting posture. This study completed an instant recording and dynamic assessment of position measurement and feedback system. The system consists of a number of dynamic measurement units that can describe the posture trajectory, which integrates three-axis gyro meter, three-axis accelerometer, and magnetometer in order to measure the dynamic tracking. In the reliability analysis experiment, angle measurement error is less than 2%. The correlation coefficient between correlation analysis and Motion Analysis (MA) is 0.97. It is shown that the motion trajectory of this system is highly correlated with MA. In the feasibility test of sitting position detection, it is possible to detect the sitting position from the basic action of the walking, standing, sitting and lying down, and the sensitivity reaches 95.84%. In the assessment of the sitting position, the information published by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety was used, as well as the recommendations of professional physicians as a basis for evaluating the threshold of the sitting measurement parameters and immediately feedback to the subjects. The system developed in this study can be helpful to reduce neck and back pain due to long-term poor sitting posture.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC, for supporting this research under Contracts MOST 105-2221-E-035-064-.

Funding

This study was funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC (Grant Number: MOST 105-2221-E-035-064-).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ph.D. Program of Electrical and Communications Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC

    Chi-Chih Wu

  2. Department of Automatic Control Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC

    Chuang-Chien Chiu

  3. School of Physical Therapy, Chung Shan Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC

    Chun-Yu Yeh

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  1. Chi-Chih Wu
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Correspondence to Chi-Chih Wu.

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Wu, CC., Chiu, CC. & Yeh, CY. Development of wearable posture monitoring system for dynamic assessment of sitting posture. Phys Eng Sci Med 43, 187–203 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-019-00836-4

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