Feasibility of a novel back support device to improve spine stability and muscular activity during trunk flexion: A prospective cross-sectional study with healthy controls and low back pain subjects - preliminary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Low back pain is a prevalent global condition often challenging to address due to the absence of a definitive diagnosis in over 80 % of cases. Manual lifting, common in many work environments, contributes to low back pain due to lumbar spine stresses, and existing assistive technologies like abdominal belts and exoskeletons have limitations in managing low back pain effectively. This paper presents a novel back support device designed to generate abdominal compression during flexion activities, potentially enhancing lumbar stability through increased intra-abdominal pressure. METHODS: The study involved 14 participants with chronic non-specific low back pain and 18 gender-matched healthy controls doing controlled movement tests with and without the support device. FINDINGS: Results suggest that the back support device increased intra-abdominal pressure in both groups during various functional tasks, more notably in active flexion and lifting tasks (up to +43 %). The device also contributed to decreasing lumbar range of motion during guided flexion (-18 to -37 %, except at the lumbosacral junction in the low back pain group), emphasizing its potential impact in limiting excessive spinal movement. Muscle activity assessments revealed decreased activation during active flexion and lifting movements while wearing the device, suggesting the possibility to assist trunk stabilization without the corresponding antagonistic muscle activation and associated compressive load on the spine. INTERPRETATION: These effects could help workers to maintain their activities in the workplace and help workers suffering from low back pain to gradually reintegrate work or physical activities, contributing to better overall management of back health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".