Comparison of scapula soft tissue artefact compensation methods during manual wheelchair locomotion

Abstract

Two third of manual wheelchair (MWC) users report suffering or having suffered from shoulder pain or injury [1]. To favour the understanding of these disorders, it is crucial to quantify the shoulder kinematics and kinetics during MWC locomotion [2]. However, soft tissue artefacts (STA) are particularly present at the scapula, making it difficult to accurately track the bone motion [3], motivating researchers to propose compensation methods based on acromion or scapula spine marker clusters and a calibration pose [4]. Apart from invasive or irradiative methods, the reference method to localize the scapula bone is based on external palpation generally through the use of a scapula palpator (SP) [5]. In this study, we propose to compare the scapula kinematics reconstructed from a cluster with STA compensation based on one or two calibration static poses during the push phase with the reference method using a SP.