A portable wireless solution for back pain telemonitoring: A 3D-based, virtual reality approach

Abstract

Over the years, an increasing number of the adult population suffers from some form of back pain during their lifetime, something that consecutively has a very important impact on a country's health, as well as economic systems. Traditional methods of diagnosing and treating such problems normally involve the collection and gathering of medical information regarding the type and location of pain, and its visualization on a 2D representation of the human body using various monochrome symbols. However, these 2-dimensional pain drawings have usually limited abilities in accurately recording and representing pain, making them in that way difficult and time consuming for both patients and doctors to use. As a result, in this work we propose an alternative interactive environment for back pain information collection and diagnosis, based on a wireless-enabled solution that encompasses a virtual reality user interface. Our proposed approach uses questionnaire methods to collect the appropriate back pain information, and via a 3-dimensional representation of the human body which can be marked in color, it could visualize and record this information, overcoming the aforementioned limitations. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.