Designing and Validation of Low Back Exerciser for Core Muscles.

Human movements are well organized and centralized at the lumbosacral junction of the body. To provide proximal stability and generate distal mobility, the Transverse Abdominis muscle plays a key role as a natural “corset”. The obesity, sedentary lifestyle and physical inactivity leads to nonuse wasting of this muscle and retraining is a major challenge. Thus there is a certain need to develop a device for strengthening this value adding muscles for bedridden population to very active individuals.This multiphasic study involves designing an electro pressure sensing device as per the curvature of spine and support of Auto-CAD model. The load cell sensor in the device identifies the pressure changes when an individual asks to flatten the lumbar curve or drawing in the abdomen.The validation of low back exerciser for activation of Transverse Abdominis assessed with MVC of EMG. The device was tested on normal individuals for efficiency of visual feedback to improve contraction of Transverse Abdominis. A testing phase observed the normal individuals (n=90) and low back pain patients (n=15) with mean age of (30.72±14.17) and (42.73±1.41) respectively. It was performed with and without feedback. An ethical approval and informed consent was obtained before the commencement of study.The present study revealed the validation MVC of Transverse Abdominis with Low back exerciser is 0.87. Low back exerciser validation for normal individuals with feedback was 0.95, without feedback was 0.93, for low back pain patients it was 0.97 .The low back exerciser was found to be a valid tool for testing and retraining of the Transverse Abdominis and it must be taken into consideration for routine practice for improving proximal stability with and without LBP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]