Effects of Weight of Dress Shirts on Arthrokinematics of Cervical Spine and Shoulders in Healthy Females Using Motion Capture Analysis: A Pilot Study

Food, shelter and clothes are basic necessities of the human being. Clothing is important to cover the human body, get protected from extremes of weather, assist in one's job roles, freedom for leisure activities and for cosmetic purposes. The quality of fabric is variable and a variety of designs of the dress shirts is available. Females are about half of total population in Pakistan. Many females use biomechanically improper dress designs particularly of the shirts, which cause uneven distribution of loads to the spine and may change the angles of the individual spinal segments. This study will help us to find the effect of dress shirt design on cervical spine and shoulder joints arthrokinematics, and investigator may proceed towards designing biomechanically and ergonomically more cost effective designs in terms of mobility, energy expenditure and prevention of musculoskeletal problems. Prevention of musculoskeletal problems can have good socioeconomic impact and help in improving health outcomes in females.

This non randomized pilot clinical trial with cross over assignment will be conducted on healthy female volunteers of 18-50 years of age with a BMI 18 and above. The participants will be divided into two groups on the basis of BMI (normal and overweight). Two interventions shirt with customized design and shirt with simple design of staple Lenin fabric will be provided to the participants. Markers for motion capture will be placed on appropriate places following standard protocols. participants' motions will be captured by specific cameras by trained engineers under the supervision of Co-PI at the movement recording lab. Recording may take 5-10 minutes in one session once the participants are prepared for the procedure. After one week of initial recording, participants will be invited for second recording with the other design of the shirt. Data will be analyzed sing IBM software SPSS version 26.0. On the basis of normality of the data, parametric or non-parametric test will be selected to compute the comparative quantitative results.