Erica Beaucage-gauvreau

Biography

Low back pain is a common and costly health condition, affecting adolescents to elderly. Although it is mainly considered idiopathic, lifting has been identified as an independent risk factor. Many daily tasks require lifting of light objects, thus increasing the risk of developing low back pain. Several of these activities can be performed with one hand, allowing for trunk support with the free hand. The braced arm-to-thigh technique is a one-handed lifting method, where the dominant hand is used to pick up low-to-moderate mass objects from ground level, while the free hand supports the trunk by applying a bracing force on the corresponding thigh. The aim of this project is to perform a biomechanical analysis of this braced arm-to-thigh lifting technique to determine if it reduces loads on the lower back when compared to more traditional two-handed (squat) or unsupported one-handed (stoop) lifts, using a computer modelling approach. Kinematics and kinetics data collected with a 12-camera Vicon motion analysis system (Oxford Metric, UK) and two force platforms (AMTI, USA), respectively, are used as inputs for a full-body OpenSim computational model to estimate the L4/L5 intervertebral joint loads for the different lifting tasks evaluated in healthy and low back pain individuals. This exciting new research is producing a validated full-body OpenSim model with a detailed lumbar spine musculature for lifting tasks specifically. This validated model will be shared and freely available to the OpenSim community, allowing different laboratories worldwide to analyse various lifting tasks. This project will also provide important insight on the stabilising effect of the arm on the thigh, supplementing the literature on the limited available data on one-hand lifting methods, particularly for the understudied low back pain population.

Research Interest

Medicine,Medical Education,Research,etc