Designing the Platform to Relieve Low Back Pain through Wearable Device and Application

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Low back pain is one of the main reasons of moving disability and for this reason it is an important issue to resolve. Five of ten business men in the United States have low back pain. Also, low back pain has almost same occurrence rate through cultural boundaries and it is one of the most complained pain on medical visits. Some experts estimates 80% of world population have back pain related problems. Recently, many researches concerning low back pain release have been published. These researches made many suggestions about treatments for the pain and one of the most effective treatments is far-infrared treatment. Although effectiveness of the device is already confirmed by many researches, the users don't experience such an effective care of the pain. This low satisfaction and poor reviews call for improvement of user cognition about effectiveness of the device.

This project was launched to enhance pain relief awareness. Especially this project focused on two main methods. The first method is utilization of multi-sensory stimulation. More specifically, the method provides visual effect in addition to tangible effect. The second method is utilization of application to control and manage the device. Each study has its own background, personal approach, prototyping, and evaluation section. As a result, we confirmed that the suggested platform is to relieve the user’s back pain through wearable device and application.

In this paper, we suggest a multi-sensory stimulation device to improve the perception of the user and management application to improve the usability of the device. We build a prototype to relieve low back pain through wearable device and application and there is a significance as a platform.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract 4
• Ⅰ. Introduction 6
• 1. Background 6
• 2. Research Question 8
• Ⅱ. Study 1: Multi-sensory stimulation 10
• 1. Background 10
• 2. Personal Approach 11
• 3. Prototyping 13
• 4. Evaluation 16
• 4.1. Method 16
• 4.2. Evaluation 16
• Ⅲ. Study 2: Management Application 21
• 1. Background 21
• 2. Personal Approach 22
• 3. Prototyping 24
• 4. Evaluation 27
• 4.1. Method 27
• 4.2. Evaluation 28
• Ⅳ. Interview 29
• Ⅴ. Conclusion 30
• 1. Conclusion 30
• 2. Future Work 31
• Reference 33
• Appendix 37
• Korean Abstract 40