Facilitating trunk endurance assessment by means of mobile health technologies

Trunk endurance tests are widely used in physical medicine to assess the muscle status of people affected by low back pain. Nevertheless, traditional evaluation procedures suffer from practical limitations, which can lead to potential misdiagnoses. This work presents mDurance, a novel mobile health system aimed at supporting specialists in the functional assessment of trunk endurance by using wearable and mobile devices. The system makes use of a wearable inertial sensor to track the patient trunk posture, while portable electromyography sensors are employed to seamlessly measure the electrical activity produced by the trunk muscles. The information registered by the sensors is processed and managed by a mobile application that facilitates the expert normal routine, while reducing the impact of human errors and expediting the analysis of the test results. The reliability and usability of mDurance is proved through a case study, thus demonstrating its potential interest for regular physical therapy routines.