Pilot Quality Improvement Study of SafeBack

Abstract

Caregivers, including nurses, personal support workers, and family caregivers, have a high risk of low back pain due to the patient-handling postures they use. Often, caregivers place the needs of the care recipient above their own. This means that caregivers may use postures that put them at risk of injury. Often times, these caregivers may not even be aware of the potential for injury due to their posture selection. Therefore, there is a need for easy-to-use, inexpensive, and accessible education and training tools that can be used to guide the use of safer patient-handling postures. To address this need, we have developed SafeBack: a mobile application for estimating low back forces in either real-time or from photographs taken of the postures in need of evaluation. The app requires user- posturing of skeleton, and the input of anthropometric and load data before low back compression forces can be estimated. The purpose of this study was to run a pilot quality improvement study to gather user feedback about the SafeBack App. The results show that the App, in its current form, has acceptable usability, but that improvements are needed before it can be used as a post ure training and/or injury prevention tool.