System Evaluation of Optical Screening and Conditioning for Injury Resilience

Non-combat musculoskeletal injuries (MSKIs) are the leading cause of medical disability across the military, with poor exercise form-including misalignment and mistiming-being key contributors. Rehabilitation and conditioning can build resilience and reduce risk. Our recent work resulted in a prototype Optical Screening and Conditioning for Injury Resilience (OSCIR) system offering real-time, non-contact, biofeedback through field-deployable motion capture equipped with three-dimensional (3D) camera-based technology and an augmented reality (AR) viewer for tracking exercise form while detecting and alerting the users of high injury risk movement patterns. Developments were shaped by military end-users across the U.S. This study assessed the usability of our field-deployed system and validated real-time biomechanical metrics against those computed from a marker-based system.

OSCIR includes a laptop computer, two red-green-blue-depth (RGB-D) camera arrays, and a software package including nine exercise modules that display in real-time, the user's point cloud, a skeleton with graphical biofeedback, and range of motion tracking with exercise-specific MSKI risk indicators. Biomechanical accuracy validation was conducted among n = 13 nonmilitary controls in compliance with Western-Copernicus Group. Usability was assessed among n = 33 healthy active duty servicemembers at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton and Explosive Ordinance Disposal Group One training facilities using the system usability survey (SUS) and structured interviews in compliance with Naval Medical Center San Diego Institutional Review Board protocol.

Compared to the marker-based system, OSCIR's metrics resulted in Intraclass Correlation Coefficient estimates between 0.80 and 0.98 ("good" to "excellent" agreement) for each metric. End-user feedback was notably positive, earning "excellent" SUS scores (Mean ± SD = 80.77 ± 12.93).

OSCIR achieves high agreement with the gold-standard system for biomechanical metrics, and its user-friendly features score highly among military stakeholders. OSCIR will help military stakeholders manage MSKIs in warfighters by automating training and rehabilitation batteries, making quantitative form-correction readily accessible and accurate for operational training environments.