Backpack massages muscles when it detects they’re fatigued
· New Scientist
A backpack can detect when muscles become fatigued and automatically massage the affected areas. This seems to help muscles recover better than heat therapy or pre-programmed massages, like those delivered by chairs and cushions.
About 1 in 6 adults in the UK have some form of back pain. This can occur when back muscles become fatigued through exertion or prolonged or repetitive activity. Persistent fatigue can impair local blood flow and tissue recovery, potentially contributing to chronic pain.
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Tired back muscles can be relieved through heat therapy and automated massage, which often involves rollers moving across the back in pre-programmed patterns. But these tend to be standardised treatments that don’t take into account people’s individual muscular issues, says Chengsong Yu at the Wuhan Institute of Technology in China.
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if( window?.adverts?.addToArray ) { window.adverts.addToArray( { "pos": "mid-article-slot" } ); }Looking for a more bespoke approach, Yu and his colleagues have developed a wearable system, like a backpack, that uses electrodes on the skin to monitor electrical activity in four groups of back muscles. The system then determines which muscles are fatigued, and how much. Cables move a soft massage head to the affected areas, where sensor feedback allows the system to continually adjust the force according to the fatigue levels, says Yu.
To test their device, the researchers asked 11 men and four women, aged 20 to 26, with no known health issues, to spend 2 minutes resting, followed by 2 minutes repeatedly lifting dumbbells while seated. This induces fatigue in the rhomboids, the muscles between the shoulder blades.
Sign up to Health Check Sign up to newsletterAll the participants wore the backpack during the dumbbell exercise so it could record their muscles’ electrical activity, but only some then received the backpack’s massage. The remaining participants divided into groups that received another type of pre-programmed massage, had heat therapy or rested.
During the exercise, the electrical activity in the participants’ rhomboids fell as the muscles became fatigued, indicating weaker muscle activation. But after the backpack treatment, this activity was about 2.6 times higher compared with after the pre-programmed massage, indicating greater recovery. It was also about 1.9 times higher than after heat treatment, and four times higher than after resting.
“We were encouraged by how clearly the adaptive system improved muscle recovery compared with preprogrammed mechanostimulation and thermal stimulation,” says Yu.
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Conor Walsh at Harvard University says the device is a move in a “creative direction” for combining soft robotics with mechanical therapy to address back pain and muscle fatigue. But it needs to be lighter and less bulky before it can become a practical solution, he says.
“There are definitely some very interesting engineering features in the system, and I see a lot of value in this as a proof of concept for this technology,” says Olivier Lambercy at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “But if you want to use it in the context of people working on the assembly line as they claim, I think this is a bit far into the future.”
The team hopes to make the design smaller and more compact, and to test it in a larger group of people working in real-world conditions that may cause back pain, says Yu.
Journal Reference:Cell Reports Physical Science DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2026.103505