TENS device for cervical pain during teleworking controlled remotely by mobile application

Abstract

Monitoring cervical muscle pain during teleworking, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and increased remote work, highlights electrotherapy as a crucial physical therapy tool to mitigate muscle pain and promote tissue recovery, addressing ergonomic and occupational health problems that affect the well-being of remote workers. The research proposes to design a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device to monitor cervical muscle pain during teleworking, addressing the urgent need for technological solutions to mitigate this problem and improve the quality of life of teleworkers through data acquisition and processing, hardware development, implementation device monitoring, and evaluation software. For this, a TENS device was designed with a graphical interface to treat muscle pain in the neck of teachers who do remote work, dividing it into four stages: signal acquisition and generation, Bluetooth communication with an Android device, signal conditioning, and amplification and protection, following a development scheme that includes circuit design in Proteus and the creation of a mobile application in App Inventor. In conclusion, it was obtained that the power supplies have an average error of less than 1%, indicating good general performance and confirming the consistency and optimal performance of the proposed therapies.