Sport-related back injury prevention with a wearable device

Abstract

There has been a high incidence rates (∼41%) of back injury from undertaking weightlifting exercises as a result of improper lifting posture, where the spine should remain straight during a lifting movement which is often not adopted correctly by adolescent or beginner athletes. In this work we report a wearable device prototype consisting of independent sensor nodes using inertial measurement units to provide the user with real-time postural feedback on a companion application. From the data collected from four subjects, for several weight-lifting attempts, a strong correlation was found in the relative pitch angle between the upper cervical sensor and lower-lumbar sensor, which proved that the straightness of the user’s back could be inferred using only two sensor nodes.

Keywords

• Back injury
• Low-power
• Sensors
• Wearable
• Weight-lifting