A Wearable System for Evaluation of PSSE Compliance for AIS Patient

For adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), a common condition in children, physiotherapy scoliosis-specific exercise (PSSE) is an effective conservative treatment. However, the long-term process of PSSE treatment often leads to low compliance during unsupervised exercises. In this study, we proposed a wearable system for the evaluation of PSSE compliance for AIS patients. The proposed system contains wearable devices and analysis software. The wearable device collected surface electromyography (sEMG) data from back muscles. We extracted features from sEMG data, and adopted support vector machine classifiers to evaluate PSSE compliance for AIS patients in the software. To validate the proposed system, we collected data from 11 AIS patients during a typical exercise in PSSE. Among the extracted features, the most promising for differentiating PSSE compliance were those related to electromyography (EMG) amplitude and muscle fatigue. Specifically, the integrated EMG and frequency ratio showed strong potential. To evaluate the proposed system, we adopted leave-one-subject-out cross-validation, resulting in perfect accuracy. The results showed that the proposed system was potentially feasible for evaluating PSSE compliance in AIS patients to achieve optimal efficacy, and was convenient for supporting clinicians and parents in monitoring correction of AIS patients' PSSE execution.Clinical Relevance- This system provides a method for evaluating PSSE compliance in AIS patients, helping achieve optimal PSSE efficacy.