A Wireless Wearable Back Angle Measurement System for Sports and Therapeutic Applications

Abstract

Back angle measurement in coronal plane provides a significant insight into the condition of spinal cord for certain physical conditions. This data would especially be useful for sports and therapeutic conditions, namely for modification of playing styles, ergonomic design, treatment of back pain and many more. Such data can also be used for injury predictions in case of repeated similar lower back movements. In this communication the authors implemented a wearable wireless system which can gather the necessary data from the candidate’s body which can be further used with data analytic techniques. The implemented system is based on a modular platform which uses plug and play hardware modules viz. micro-controller, accelerometer sensor, gyroscope and an RF module. A wireless node designed, which can use the sensor data to analyze lower back movement of subject’s body. A hub-module is connected to the laptop at remote site for wireless data acquisition of the meaningful signals. The implemented system shows improvement in experiment error which is an advantage over similar existing systems.