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Show HN: I spent 3 years building a wearable to understand my back pain (gem-manatee-cd0.notion.site)

2 points by RohKo ↗ HN
Hello my name is Rohan Kotecha for the past 2 years I’ve been working on decoding my back pain with wearables which track how my spine moves throughout my life. This is inspired by fatigue from cookie-cutter advice/exercises from each new PT/chiro/osteo I'd see. It was a long journey involving teaching myself PCB design, many nights holed up in factories and hostels in Shenzhen to make cheap prototypes. I wrote up my process/thinking and thought the story of how this project came to be would interest you all. Thank you for reading.

10 comments

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RohKo
A little colour on this: I’ve had back pain since I was 13, tried numerous forms of care, became increasingly irritated by the differing opinions between specialists and vague advice e.g. “it’s to do with how you move outside the clinic, but here’re some exercises that may help, lets see how it goes.” I also found it odd that there are seemingly no quantified tests/measurements, like in the rest of healthcare

I started by getting in touch with academics to understand the latest research. I learnt: Back pain is NOT linked to posture, but rather to movement. (It’s a cultural myth!) Back pain tracks with back movement speed. I.e. how freely you’re able to move, without subconsciously guarding against pain. People’s back pain is also driven both by biomechanics and psychology, and the cause of everyone’s pain lies on a spectrum between the two. Spinal discs are avascular so they don’t have their own blood supply. It’s theorised that they rely on movement to exchange nutrients.

I set out to track full spinal movement, so I can see the velocity of different parts of my spine (my upper back is my problem), and see which parts of my spine aren’t moving enough over my day, so I know my whole spine is healthy.

I started with esp32s and the like attached to a tank top, to figure out how to track the motion, before committing to a custom PCB. I then went through many iterations trying to make this work, but found handling the random garment movement is a super hard problem, so I had to find something more flush with the skin, which ended up being KT tape. That proved to work much better. Obligatory vibe coding apps along the way.

Thanks for taking the time :)

lucaswcampa
I've had back pain all my life and haven't found anything to fix is. Excited to try this
RohKo
Oh wow, what have you tried thus far? Dyou have a similar story re many PTs etc.?
Oliverhdez
Super cool, I wonder if it can help figure out which parts of my back are weaker and why others have to pick up the slack?
danishshaik
I love this, been struggling with back pain for the past years months and I’m getting pretty sick of lidocaine patches. Excited to try this out
rorytbyrne
Does it depend on body shape/height/etc? Could “bad posture” for me “equal good” posture for someone with a longer back or narrower shoulders or something?
sachinkesiraju
Great work, the sports tape approach sounds very interesting