Modern Technology Meets Ancient Wisdom to Address Back Pain - Using Wearables to Track and Improve Posture

In industrialized societies, a huge percentage of the population suffers from back pain. Back pain is the largest contributor to decline in productivity of workers, and costs $200 - $600 billion per year in the United States.

The Gokhale Method® addresses back pain by teaching postural modifications. Crowdsourcing data shows the method to be an outlier in effectiveness for back pain. To support posture training, we developed SpineTracker™ and PostureTracker™, two wearable devices which provide real-time posture feedback to the student. SpineTracker is a five sensor unit that accurately shows the shape of the lumbar spine; PostureTracker is a two sensor unit that helps students to catch themselves when they depart from a personal ideal.

During our presentation, we will give an introduction to the principles of the Gokhale Method and provide an overview of our research based on our wearables."