Innovative Technologies for Functional Evaluation of Posture and Movement in Rehabilitation, Sports and Ageing

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last twenty years, biomechanics has been progressively moving from research laboratories to routine clinical practice and the sports field. This transfer is mainly due to the awareness that it is necessary to carry out quantitative tests of function to understand human posture and movement, their optimisation for sports performance or the failures produced by pathology or ageing.

Therefore, quantitative functional assessment represents one of the main objectives to be achieved and, at the same time, one of the most challenging issues to be addressed for healthcare professionals, sports medicine biomechanists, and researchers.

Significant advances in motion capture equipment, research methodologies, and data analysis techniques have enabled a plethora of studies that have advanced our understanding of posture and movement biomechanics, proprioception and neuromotor control. However, despite these advances, much of the biomechanical research has investigated the influence of potential injury risk factors in isolation. More likely, multiple biomechanical and clinical variables interact and operate as combined risk factors.

Research in biomechanics is moving in two main directions.

On the one hand, to capture the complexity of these relationships, it is necessary to integrate many devices working together to obtain a multifactorial approach (i.e., considering multiple factors and their interaction) using sophisticated, increasing complex human body biomechanical models producing a holistic view of the functional expression of posture and movement.

In this perspective, a quantitative functional assessment of posture and movement analysis of the entire skeleton, including the spine, is highly desirable to assess the functional relationships between the lower and upper limbs, the spine, and the pelvis. The recent literature shows how the multifactorial approach is helping to demonstrate that spine disorders (e.g., low back pain, adult spinal deformities) and lower limb joint degeneration can be connected with load asymmetries or pelvis problems associated to leg length discrepancy, flat or arched foot or some functional impairments in the lower limbs. In the same way, the use of body kinematics associated with baropodometry aids the development of new strategies to contrast the risk factors for neuropathic diabetic foot ulceration.

On the other hand, recent advances in wearable sensing technologies and artificial intelligence (AI imaging, signal and data processing), with simplified biomechanical models, have opened up new exciting and extremely wide possibilities for the continuous monitoring of human kinematics and kinetics in free-living situations. Examples of such applications include but are not limited to analysing daily life activities, monitoring the therapeutic process, the timely detection and diagnosis of movement disorders, the evaluation of sports performance, the measurement of training activity and the associated risk of excessive physical stress and injuries affecting the musculoskeletal system, contrast through gamified exercise (exergames) of sarcopenia, osteopenia, risk of fall, and the reduction of motor function due to the ageing process.

This Special Issue aims to present recent research findings on the development and application of sensor technologies in measurements of human biomechanical and physiological parameters. In particular, the Special Issue will report on various sensors, such as video recording sensors, IMUs (inertial measurement units), plantar pressure sensors, and electromyographs. Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts for publication which address topics including (but not limited to) the following:

• Measuring the biomechanics of either the whole body or individual parts of the body.
• Studies on spinal function and motion, muscle activation and/or spinal loading resulting from various spinal disorders including (but not limited to) specific or non-specific back pain, spinal deformities (e.g., scoliosis), and degenerative spinal disorders. 
• Identifying biomechanical risk factors for the prediction of spinal disorders, as well as biomechanical factors related to disease progression.
• Biomechanical and functional effects of current conservative and surgical treatment interventions.
• Relationship between biomechanical factors and clinical outcomes.
• Implementation of biomechanical assessments into clinical practice using, for example, wearable sensors or AI-based video analysis.
• Biomechanical sensors in disease assessment, functional diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation.
• Baropodometry and plantar pressure analysis.
• Biomechanical sensors for assisted living monitoring.
• Biomechanical sensors in gait analysis.
• Biomechanical sensors in sports.
• Novel applications of the continuous monitoring of human motion in rehabilitation.
• Surface electromyography.
• IMUs for human motion tracking.
• Force sensors (strain gauge, piezo, etc.).
• Optical tracking systems.
• Challenges in data processing, simulation, and validation.
• Challenges in data sensor fusion.
• Technical challenges in assuring the accuracy and robustness of the provided measures (i.e., sensor placement, measurement drift, repeatability of the provided measures).
• Wireless sensors for human motion tracking.

Dr. Moreno D'Amico
Dr. Edyta Kinel
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• biomechanics
• posture
• gait analysis
• stereo-photogrammetry
• spine
• spinal disorders
• low back pain, surface electromyography
• baropodometry
• plantar pressure analysis
• wearable sensors
• markerless movement analysis
• AI-based video analysis