iNeck - A Little Health Guardian for Your Neck

iNeck - A Little Health Guardian for Your Neck

Cervical spondylosis is a disease which keeps perplexing human beings, and its incidence has been rocketing due to the unhealthy lifestyle of contemporary people. According to the statistics, the incidence of cervical spondylosis in China has reached to 17.3% with the suffering population more than 100 million and, to our disappointment, the incidence among adolescents has been increasing even faster.

Suffering from cervical spondylosis will lead to dizziness, ache of head, neck, back, shoulders or arms, inflexibility of neck and myasthenia of limbs, cephalagra or even encephalanalosis if severe. These symptoms will all do great harm to the patients’ normal life.

The main predisposition of cervical spondylosis is the neck strain arising from long-time lowering one’s head, as a result of which long-time reading burying one’s head, driving or using a PC for long hours may all result in cervical spondylosis. According to relevant research, one who has lowered his head for more than one hour should relax his neck at once for at least ten minutes, but workers or students can hardly develop the habit only by themselves.

Therefore, iNeck was developed. As part of it, a very light inclinometer can be clipped on an arm of glasses or a headset, which is connected via a cable to the device with a size of an mp3 player. The headset will play a musical hint once the inclinometer detects a long-time burying. In addition, the device provides a connector for myoelectricity electrodes, which can collect the electromyography (EMG) of users’ necks so as to judge the severity of the users’ neck suffering.

Got the third prize in the 4th "CapitalBio Cup" Medical Instrument Design Contest

Main pre-disposition of cervical spondylosis - long-time lowering one’s head

Function 1: Neck Posture Monitor

Function 1: Flow Chart

Function 2: Neck EMG Measurement

Sticking the surface electrode to the starting point of the user's trapezius muscle with two reference electrodes 2 cm above and below it, collect the user's neck EMG for 10s. Then the EMG data is integrated to get iEMG, which can be used to judge the severity of the user’s neck suffering.