Force and activity monitoring system for scoliosis patients wearing back braces

Monitoring the effectiveness of brace treatment of scoliosis is an ongoing challenge that many physicians face today. Scoliosis is a medical condition which occurs in adolescents, where an individual's spine develops curvature. To successfully monitor compliance with brace treatment, a wearable multi-modal sensor solution is embedded into the patient's brace. The custom-designed hardware consists of a sensor board, a force sensor, an accelerometer and a gyroscope. The force sensor collects the force being exerted on the patient's back, while the accelerometer and gyroscope generate cues to determine the patient's activities and lifestyle. In this paper, we propose a novel data-mining method to identify patient activities and evaluate the effectiveness of the brace treatment pervasively. Our aim is to design a context-aware remote monitoring system for ubiquitous evaluation and enhancement of brace treatment compliance of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis patients. Data is collected through the sensors and stored on a SD card and for longitudinal analysis. We investigated an experimental scenario in which, the patient performs a series of pre-defined activities at home during day-long segments of brace wear. Our experimental results demonstrated that we achieved an overall accuracy of a 100% for activity detection in a semi-supervised experimental setup. It was also observed that the duration of brace wear increased from 20% to 80% in 4 weeks.