The efficacy and incorporation of biofeedback in medical professionals’ ergonomic awareness

Healthcare workers, primarily those in the surgical field and dentistry, have a high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) due to maintaining prolonged awkward or unsafe postures induced by environmental working conditions that have generated few new worker safety regulations throughout the decades. The associated chronic, debilitating pain significantly impacts their careers and lives, and it frequently leads to early retirement and, ergo, a critical loss of talent and productivity that required years of expensive training to obtain. Previous work has provided a wealth of subjective data, which indicates a certain level of negation of the prevalence and impact of these medical conditions. Although a problem has been identified, an objective, quantifiable method of determining the key factors contributing toward injury or tracking improvements resulting from interventions is missing. This thesis provides an in depth approach to developing a wearable sensor based system that acquires muscle activation and spinal orientation and use the acquired data to employee haptic biofeedback. To accomplish this goal a two separate research studies were conducted. The purpose of the first study is to evaluate if the wearable sensors, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and surface electromyography (EMG) sensors, can quantify differences in spine orientations and muscle activity, respectively, for different postures that were constrained with haptic biofeedback. Results of the first study indicate that biofeedback induces significant changes in both muscle activity and spinal orientation. This signifies that biofeedback can be a viable method in training future healthcare professionals. The purpose of the second study was to implement a novel haptic real-time biofeedback system with the usage of IMU and EMG data guidance to train dental students to develop more mechanically advantageous working postures. Results of the second study suggest that biofeedback can be used as a training method for dental students to adopt more mechanically advantageous working postures without compromising work conditions. Overall, both studies employed novel sensor based data acquisition and real-time biofeedback to provide quantifiable data in risk factors to MSD and prevention measures in real time.