Title : Quantifying and visualising spinal posture alignment and movement in real-life settings: Leveraging new technologies
Abstract:
Painful, stiff spinal musculoskeletal conditions are among the leading causes for seeking physiotherapy care. Clinical spinal posture assessment and prescription is standard practice in physiotherapy management of spinal musculoskeletal conditions. Physiotherapists aim to reduce adverse spinal tissue loading associated with poor spinal alignment by encouraging patients to adopt neutral spinal positions during functional tasks, particularly sitting. Critique of posture prescription, that assessment duration is short and thus not representative; is not feasible to maintain for prolonged periods; is static and overlooks the inevitable small, involuntary movement during functional tasks led to the concept of dynamic posture prescription. Dynamic posture assessment and prescription shifts the focus from maintaining prescribed static spinal alignment to encouraging regular changes in posture to offset the adverse tissue-level effects of prolonged static loading. The shortcomings of both methods are the lack of objectivity in assessment and the lack of guidance about the duration and frequency of the prescribed posture. This presentation reports the findings of a proof-of-concept study of a novel, objective posture analysis methodology that provides rich, integrated spinal alignment and temporal behaviour information in a highly ecologically valid context. Mathematical estimates of cervical, thoracic, and lumbar alignment and movement are calculated from signals received from inertial measurement units placed on the head, the 7th cervical and 12th thoracic spinous processes, and the sacrum. A novel pause/movement detection algorithm classifies spinal signals into short (<30s) or long (>30s) stationary categories. A visual dashboard of spinal posture is produced that displays the spinal positioning during short and long stationary periods. The integration of spinal alignment and temporal behaviour incorporated in this posture assessment method is a significant enhancement of traditional and instrumented posture assessment methods. This method can be used to monitor changes in spinal posture in real-life settings which can provide valuable patient feedback. Furthermore, the visual dashboard can be used to implement ergonomic changes and provide more holistic physiotherapy care.
