Evaluation and personalized rehabilitation using serious game of spinal kinematics in chronic low back pain

There is a critical need to improve care for chronic low back pain (CLBP), a leading socioeconomic burden worldwide. Multiple factors are involved in this condition, requiring multidisciplinary therapeutic management. Nevertheless, spinal kinematic dysfunction is particularly important and advancing its rehabilitation options offers a real potential to improve the outcomes of CLBP treatment. This project, proposed by a multidisciplinary team, aims at introducing and assessing new methods to score spinal kinematics globally as well as to provide individual detailed characterization in the form of kinematic profiles. It will also provide and assess a novel, personalized solution for rehabilitation targeting the spinal kinematic impairment specific to each patient. To this end, it will combine state-of-the-art in motion analysis and serious game and bring them to routine practice. Furthermore, it will follow recent literature and consider analytical, functional, as well as more complex movements induced by serious gaming. This project will test two primary hypotheses regarding the performance of spinal kinematics evaluation and the benefit of using a serious game for personalized rehabilitation. Analyses will also be performed to improve our understanding of the CLBP mechanism, such as the association between kinematics, pain and disability.

Ninety asymptomatic individuals and two groups of 90 patients with CLBP referred to an on-site program of four to five weeks at the SUVA Rehabilitation Clinics in Sion (CRR) will be enrolled in this study. In summary, by introducing new evaluation and rehabilitation methods and by assessing them in a real clinical situation, this project will contribute to a better understanding of CLBP and could open the way to a novel, more effective therapeutic management

• Dr Julien Favre, PhD, PD, MER, Co-director of the Swiss BioMotion Lab at the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV)
• Dr Francois Luthi, head of the Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation Ward at the CRR SUVA Sion
• Dr Cyrille Burrus, CRR SUVA Sion
• Guillaume Christe, HESAV