Each year approximately 10,000 Danes are being told that they have cervical radiculopathy (CR), which is neck pain that radiates into the arm caused by an irritated nerve in the neck and usually developed as a result of a disc herniation or degenerative arthritis. Treatments for this diagnosis are training therapies, which means that the patient must perform a number of specific neck exercises to reduce the pain. The exercises can be direction-specific, stability-enhancing and posture-corrective.

However, there are only a few major studies in the field of CR, and so far they have provided no answers on whether some of the current exercises produce better effects than others on CR patients. In the project "Sensors for neck-pain training", Patient@home focuses on this and other issues within the field.

The project

The project aims to develop, test and validate technologies that can support diagnostics and choice of exercises targeted towards patients with CR. Using technologies developed by the company ICURA, the project wishes to describe differences in selected patients' postures, the way they use their neck muscles and the way they move around. The latter descriptions will be compared with those of patients, who suffer from neck pain without radiation down their arms, and persons who do not suffer from neck pain.

One imaginary example could be a CR patient that turns his/her head less smoothly than a person not suffering from CR. The said technologies shall also be able to register pain-induced changes in movements that can subsequently be reported by the patients themselves via an app.

One of the project milestones aims to change CR patients' neck and back postures by using electronic devices that can tell them when to adjust their postures. This is a way to actively address patients that suffer from Kinesiophobia (fear of movement). Thus, it is expected that the project will ultimately result in the realisation of training and pain management activities being transferred from hospitals to patients' own homes, as the technology available will be something that the users can manage themselves.

Generally speaking, the project intends to set and achieve quality goals that can differentiate healthy people from CR patients and patients with common neck pain, so that it will be possible to target training methods directly to CR patients and develop the said technologies for this purpose.