Current Directions in Biomedical Engineering 2019;5(1):257-260 Open Access. © 2019 Puian Tadayon et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Puian Tadayon*, Thomas Felderhoff, Andreas Knopp, Gerhard Staude Mobile System for the Prevention, Diagnosis, and Personalized Treatment of Neck Pain Under a Patient’s Everyday Life Circum- stances Abstract: This work presents a new system concept for the prevention, diagnosis and interactive treatment of neck pain. It comprises two measurement units worn at the head and the torso, a smartphone/tablet and a medical assistance software. The system aims to provide mobile measurement of full neck movement including rotatory and translatory movements under a patients everyday life circumstances. Multiple features including biofeedback and therapy exercises are intended to be individually configurable according to the specific medical indications of the patient. In addition to the system concept the current implementation state comprising the two measurement units and a visualization app running on a tablet is presented. Keywords: Neck pain, interactive therapy, biofeedback, inertial sensors, magnetic field system https://doi.org/10.1515/cdbme-2019-0065 1 Introduction Chronicle or recurring neck pain is a serious and widespread disease: complaints in the neck area are the third most common cause of chronicle pain in Europe [2]. The main reasons for neck pain lie in the lack of movement and rigid neck posture in monotonous activities e.g. during work with computers and the prolonged use of smartphone or tablets. However, currently no technical devices exist which provide the acquisition of a person’s neck posture and movement under conditions of daily life. Existing approaches for mobile measurement of neck movement are mainly based on inertial sensors and thus only provide the acquisition of rotatory, but not translatory movement (e.g. [3, 4]). For the determination of translatory movement including protraction and retraction the position of the head in relation to the torso must be available. Especially during work in front of PC or Laptop monitors, the head is often in a forward position compared to the torso. This pose is disadvantageous for the neck muscles when held over a longer period [5] and thus an important indicator in the assessment of neck pain causes. Available systems which provide full motion acquisition including rotatory and translatory movements of the head in relation to the torso are based on stationary components, e.g. multiple cameras or ultrasonic sources with fixed distances to each other [6, 7], and thus not suitable for mobile movement acquisition during a patient’s everyday life circumstances. Therefore, in the research project MEDITHENA funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), a new interactive and personalizable system concept for the prevention, diagnosis, and therapy of neck pain is proposed which provides full neck movement acquisition including both rotatory and translatory movements. Section 2 of this paper describes the full system ______ *Corresponding author: Puian Tadayon Research Center for BioMedical Technology (BMT), Fachhochschule Dortmund, Sonnenstr. 96, 44139 Dortmund, Germany, Puian.Tadayon@fh- dortmund.de Thomas Felderhoff: Research Center for BioMedical Technology (BMT), Fachhochschule Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany Gerhard Staude, Andreas Knopp: Chair of Signal Processing (EIT 3.2), Munich University of the Bundeswehr, Neubiberg, Ge rmany Figure 1: System design comprising the measurement system, the mobile terminal and the medical assistance software