Sunday 1 October 2017 8:53am
PhD candidate, Sabarinath Prasad, is the successful recipient of Pain@Otago's small project award for 2017. Sabarinath's project tests the validation of a wireless device to assess EG activity in freely moving subjects. The assessing committee were impressed with the proposal and the potential for the research to extend to other members of the Pain theme.
Sabarinath, and team, believe that once 'successfully validated, the wearable miniature EMG device and smartphone app, can help collect muscle activity data over long-period in real time as subjects carry on with their routine life, instead of having to rely on periodic reports from a hospital or lab. In future, this will present Pain@Otago with unique opportunities to collect data on muscle contractions in patients who suffer from muscle pain and to test for possible associations between the muscle overuse and pain and comparing it with established normative data' Sabarinath's primary supervisor is Professor Mauro Farella from the School of Dentistry.
Lay summary
Disorders of the musculoskeletal system account for a quarter of the total annual health costs in New Zealand. Diagnosis of work related musculoskeletal pain from muscles of the lower back, neck/shoulder and tension type headache are complex and often necessitate a comprehensive assessment approach. To help establish a diagnosis and better understand the extent of musculoskeletal pain, in these conditions, data is obtained by a detailed history and clinical examination. However, this visual observation and manual palpation of muscles is a highly subjective, qualitative assessment and lacks objectivity. Surface electromyography (SEMG) is a technique for detecting and analysing electrical signals from contracting muscles. Objective assessment of the frequency, magnitude and duration of muscle contractions is possible with SEMG allowing both clinicians and patients with musculoskeletal pain to have direct and immediate access to muscle functioning. Presently, most SEMG systems are relatively large, generally restricted to a laboratory environment, fixed and restrain individuals during
muscle activity recording. To overcome the abovementioned problems, we have recently developed a novel SEMG device that is small, wireless and user-friendly. This device is interfaced with a smart phone which serves as a data logger, to record muscle activity continuously in real-time, and nonobtrusively over prolonged periods (>24 hours) while individuals move freely in their real-life environment. The aim of this research project is to evaluate the validity and feasibility of the newly developed miniature wireless SEMG device. Ten participants will be recruited for a dual setting study. The first will be a lab based setting where recruited participants will be asked to perform several oral tasks under computer guidance and recording of muscle activity done in parallel using the wireless device and a conventional lab SEMG recorder as reference standard. The second part will be a continuous 24-hour period of muscle activity recording in a routine, normal, real life setting using the wireless device. Successful validation of the device will permit long term, continuous monitoring of muscle activity in free moving subjects and establish baseline normative data from the long-term muscle activity recording.