Analysis of Chronic Joint Pain Using Soft Computing Techniques

In recent years, chronic pain in joints is the most common type of musculoskeletal pain among office workers. As the work culture in the office has been changed, it is the common demand that everyone has to work with a computer. In office, the worker has to sit continuously on a personal computer at least for 3–4 h. Most of the time, this leads to chronic pain in joints, generally after the period of few years of repeated exposure to such kind of regular engagement of user-computer interfacing, which is consequently converted into a serious health concern in the considerably large-sized office community. In this paper, an attempt has been made to provide a tool to assess the level of pain in the incumbent worker to have a reliable measure and at the disposal of medical practitioners to know the degree of pain to diagnose the severity of the health concern attached to it and have an optimum analysis which is not available even today. Around 250 samples have been taken and these cases have been categorized based on level of severity of pain, i.e. normal, medium, and severe. The results obtained show a considerable difference between mean and standard deviation values of pain level. Based on the data analysis of rectified EMG data, it has been observed that there is a notable difference in the Power Spectral Density of clean EMG signal w.r.t mean and Standard Deviation. The accuracy of the experimentally determined pain intensity level is a more reliable source for medical practitioners to make their diagnosis more objective one and this can be used as one of the measures to calibrate the pain-intensity.