Effective Assessments of a Short-Duration Poor Posture On
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bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.11.986653; this version posted March 12, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Effective Assessments of a Short-duration Poor Posture on Upper Limb Muscle Fatigue before Physical Exercise Lei Lu 1;2, Mark Robinson 1, Ying Tan 1;∗, Kusal Goonewardena 3, Xinliang Guo 1, Iven Mareels 4, Denny Oetomo 1 1Melbourne School of Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC , Australia 2School of Mechatronics Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China 3Elite Akademy Sports Medicine, Parkville, VIC, Australia 4IBM Research - Australia, Southbank, VIC, Australia Correspondence*: Ying Tan Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT the time-frequency components of sEMG of back muscles, it is observed that the low and A forward head and rounded shoulder middle frequencies of sEMG signals from the posture is a poor posture that is widely seen in infraspinatus muscle of the dominant side are everyday life. It is known that sitting in such a demonstrated to be more prone to fatigue with poor posture with long hours will bring health the poor posture. Although this study focuses issues such as muscle pain. However, it is not only on push-ups, similar experiments can be known whether sitting in this poor posture for a arranged for other physical exercises as well. short period of time will affect human activities. This study provides new insights into the effect This paper investigates the effects of a short- of a short-duration poor posture before physical duration poor posture before some typical activities. These insights can be used to guide physical activities such as push-ups. The athletes to pay attention to postures before experiments are set up as follows. Fourteen physical activities to improve performance and male subjects are asked to do push-ups until reduce the risk of injury. fatigue with two surface electromyography (sEMG) at the upper limb. Two days later, they Keywords: poor posture, surface electromyography, muscle are asked to sit in this poor posture for 15 mins fatigue, frequency spectrum, physical activity with 8 sEMG sensors located at given back muscles. Then they do the push-ups after the short-duration poor posture. The observations 1 INTRODUCTION from the median frequency of sEMG signals at Poor posture is regarded as prolonged deviations the upper limb indicate that the short-duration from the neutral spine, and it usually can be poor posture does affect the fatigue procedure characterized by the forward head posture, rounded of push-ups. A significant decreasing trend shoulders, and increased thoracic kyphosis (Singla of the performance of push-ups is obtained and Veqar, 2017; Wong and Wong, 2008). Due to after sitting in this poor posture. Such effects bad habits, poor posture is commonly observed in indicate that some parts of the back muscles various scenarios in daily life. It is reported that indeed get fatigued with only 15 minutes sitting poor posture presents emerging health risks (Jia in this poor posture. By further investigating and Nussbaum, 2018), especially, the prolonged 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.11.986653; this version posted March 12, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Lei Lu et al. Poor Posture Affected Muscle Fatigue poor posture is usually associated with the use With analyzing sEMG signal collected from back of smartphones and other portable devices, which muscles, it was shown that keeping the poor posture are reported having increasing musculoskeletal with long time had impacts on the development problems (Jung et al., 2016). of muscle fatigue (Jia and Nussbaum, 2018). For It is reported that prolonged poor posture may example, with 1-hour typing task, the neck and result in body discomfort and myofascial pain shoulder pain were observed significantly increased syndrome by placing stress and excessive tension on with forward head and thoracic kyphotic posture (Kuo et al., 2019); with 40 mins poor posture the lumbar vertebrae (Swann, 2009). For example, sitting, the trunk flexion and metrics of localized the forward head posture affected neck extensor muscle fatigue were significantly increased (Jia and muscle thickness (Goodarzi et al., 2018), and the Nussbaum, 2018). spinal misalignment had bad influence on back muscle strength and shoulder range of motion However, it is not clear whether a short-duration (Imagama et al., 2014). Meanwhile, some other of poor posture will have some negative impact on studies showed that poor posture had negative humans. It is known that the development of muscle impact on the musculo-skeletal system, caused fatigue is a time-varying procedure, it is challenging localized muscle fatigue, and may affect physical to detect muscle fatigue from the sEMG signal function and level of abilities (Ahmad and Kim, with a short-time duration of static poor posture, 2018). as changes are invisible due to small signal-to-noise In order to evaluate and measure the effect of ratio in sEMG signals. Although physiotherapists poor postures, advanced sensor technologies have think that a short period of poor posture will also been developed. Many sensors with corresponding have some negative impact on people, there is a signal-processing techniques have been used to lack of systematic study to support this believe. investigate the fatigue process during physical As physical activities can somehow speed up the activities. Examples include the motion capture- muscle fatigue process, this work tries to provide based sensors that can capture the kinematic some evidence that sitting in poor posture indeed features of humans(Bailey et al., 2018), accelerators affect the performance of physical activities after it with dynamic movements and the related metrics by carefully designed experiments. In this work, the (Beato et al., 2019), surface electromyography push-up is selected to represent a common physical (sEMG) sensors to measure the muscle activities activities due to its simplicity. (Edouard et al., 2018), etc. Among them, the The experiment consists of two steps. The first sEMG signals are shown to have excellent ability step measures the baseline of push-ups with two on revealing muscle activity at any time instant sEMG sensors to detect the fatigue of upper limb during various movements and postures Blanc and muscles. The second step, 15-minute of a poor Dimanico (2010). The sEMG signal can provide sitting posture is followed by the same push-up information to characterize muscle fatigue by means activities. The duration of short-period poor posture of changes in signal indicators (Marshall et al., is suggested by the physiotherapist. In the second 2018; Toro et al., 2019), including the mean step, each participant wears 8 sEMGs sensors on his absolute value (MAV) (Toro et al., 2019), root mean back muscles. The location of each sEMG sensor is square (RMS) (Girard et al., 2018), mean frequency suggested and verified by a physiotherapist. (MNF) and median frequency (MDF) (Bowtell et al., 2014) and so on. As the sEMG signal is usually The hypothesis is that sitting in poor posture noisy, other advanced signal processing techniques, for short time will affect the performance of the such as the wavelet transform, have been used to following physical activities. If this hypothesis is get better time-frequency resolutions (Chowdhury true, this suggests that some parts of back muscles et al., 2013). are getting fatigue during short period of poor 2 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.11.986653; this version posted March 12, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission. Lei Lu et al. Poor Posture Affected Muscle Fatigue posture, then some advanced signal processing the participants were first instructed to sit with techniques can be used to remove the noises and the poor posture, which was illustrated in Figure further investigate the measured sEMG signal. 1(D): sitting with forward head, increased thoracic kyphosis, and rounded shoulder posture. The The experimental results from 14 healthy male participants were advised to keep the poor posture subjects support our hypothesis from the statistics for 15 minutes with minimal posture adjustments of sEMG measurements. Our results indicate that or in-chair movement. During the experiment, poor posture, even a short-duration one, will have each subject was allowed to ’free his hands’, for negative impact on human activities. Therefore, example, the subject can play the mobile phone. people should be always careful of avoiding poor After sitting with poor posture for 15 minutes, postures. the participants were required to finish 1 minute 2 MATERIALS AND METHODS push-up as described in the first session. 2.1 Participants The DELSYS Trigno Biofeedback System Fourteen healthy male college students were (DELSYS Inc., Natick, MA, USA) was used to recruited for the experiment, the detailed information collect sEMG signals for analysis. Two sources of of the participants is shown in Table 1, including sEMG signals were used during the experiment, age, height, weight, and body mass index (BMI). (1) the sEMG signals were collected from biceps All subjects were right-hand dominant. The brachii and triceps brachii during push-up exercises participants were informed about the purpose and in both the two sessions. (2) During the poor content of the experiment, and a written consent posture sitting, sEMG signals were collected from was obtained prior to the study. The project was eight upper back muscles, including the right upper approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee fibers of trapezius (#1, RUFT), left upper fibers of the University of Melbourne (#1954575).