Mobile Apps for the Personal Safety of At-Risk Children and Youth: Scoping Review.

Background: Personal safety is a widespread public health issue that affects people of all demographics. There is a growing interest in the use of mobile apps for enhancing personal safety, particularly for children and youth at risk, who are among the most vulnerable groups in society.

Objective: This study aims to explore what is known about the use of mobile apps for personal safety among children and youth identified to be "at risk.

Static palpation ain't easy: Evaluating palpation precision using a topographical map of the lumbar spine as a reference.

Introduction: Clinicians commonly use manual therapy to treat low back pain by palpating the spine to identify the spinous processes. This study aims to evaluate the ability of experienced clinicians to consistently locate the spinous processes from S1 to T12 through palpation. The results will be compared to topographical data representing the lumbar lordosis at baseline and four follow-up time points.

Exploring the Impact of In Basket Metrics on the Adoption of a New Electronic Health Record System Among Specialists in a Tertiary Hospital in Alberta: Descriptive Study.

Background: Health care organizations implement electronic health record (EHR) systems with the expectation of improved patient care and enhanced provider performance. However, while these technologies hold the potential to create improved care and system efficiencies, they can also lead to unintended negative consequences, such as patient safety issues, communication problems, and provider burnout.

Objective: This study aims to document metrics related to the In Basket communication hub (time in In Basket per day, time in In Basket per appointment, In Basket messages received per day, and turnaround time) of the EHR system implemented by Alberta Health Services, the province-wide health delivery system called Connect Care (Epic Systems).

A consensus approach toward the standardization of spinal stiffness measurement using a loaded rolling wheel device: results of a Delphi study.

Background: Spinal stiffness assessment has the potential to become an important clinical measure. Various spinal stiffness-testing devices are available to help researchers objectively evaluate the spine and patient complaints. One of these is VerteTrack, a device capable of measuring posteroanterior displacement values over an entire spinal region.

Optimization of Spinal Manipulative Therapy Protocols: A Factorial Randomized Trial Within a Multiphase Optimization Framework.

Spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is a common nonpharmacological treatment for low back pain (LBP). Although generally supported by systematic reviews and practice guidelines, clinical trials evaluating SMT have been characterized by small effect sizes. This study adopts a Multiphase Optimization Strategy framework to examine individual components of an SMT delivery protocol using a single-blind trial with the goal of identifying and optimizing a multicomponent SMT protocol.

Predicting who responds to spinal manipulative therapy using a short-time frame methodology: Results from a 238-participant study.

Background: Spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) is among the nonpharmacologic interventions that has been recommended in clinical guidelines for patients with low back pain, however, some patients appear to benefit substantially more from SMT than others. Several investigations have examined potential factors to modify patients' responses prior to SMT application. The objective of this study was to determine if the baseline prediction of SMT responders can be improved through the use of a restricted, non-pragmatic methodology, established variables of responder status, and newly developed physical measures observed to change with SMT.

Reliability of a new loaded rolling wheel system for measuring spinal stiffness in asymptomatic participants.

Background: Few, if any, patient reported symptoms have been shown to be related to objective measures of spine function. Recently, patient-reported measures of disability following spinal manipulative therapy have been associated with an immediate decrease in spinal stiffness obtained by instrumented L3 indentation. Given this novel relation, we anticipate that stiffness measures obtained from locations in addition to L3 may yield valuable information.

Is there a reliable and invariant set of muscle synergy during isometric biaxial trunk exertion in the sagittal and transverse planes by healthy subjects?

It has been suggested that the central nervous system simplifies muscle control through basic units, called synergies. In this study, we have developed a novel target-matching protocol and used non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) technique to extract trunk muscle synergies and corresponding torque synergies. Isometric torque data at the L5/S1 level and electromyographic patterns of twelve abdominal and back muscles from twelve healthy participants (five females) were simultaneously recorded.

The effect of chronic low back pain on trunk accuracy in a multidirectional isometric tracking task.

Study Design: A cross-sectional study to quantify trunk motor control during multidirectional isometric tracking tasks.

Objective: To investigate the effect of chronic low back pain (LBP) on trunk neuromuscular performance while participants performed isometric exertions of trunk muscles to track targets in different angles with various magnitudes.

Summary Of Background Data: Tracking tasks especially in multidirectional activities are among the common research methods to quantify human motor control in different conditions.