Measuring Surface Electromyography with Textile Electrodes in a Smart Leg Sleeve.

This paper presents the design, development, and validation of a novel e-textile leg sleeve for non-invasive Surface Electromyography (sEMG) monitoring. This wearable device incorporates e-textile sensors for sEMG signal acquisition from the lower limb muscles, specifically the anterior tibialis and lateral gastrocnemius. Validation was conducted by performing a comparative study with eleven healthy volunteers to evaluate the performance of the e-textile sleeve in acquiring sEMG signals compared to traditional Ag/AgCl electrodes. The results demonstrated strong agreement between the e-textile and conventional methods in measuring descriptive metrics of the signals, including area, power, mean, and root mean square. The paired data t-test did not reveal any statistically significant differences, and the Bland-Altman analysis indicated negligible bias between the measures recorded using the two methods. In addition, this study evaluated the wearability and comfort of the e-textile sleeve using the Comfort Rating Scale (CRS). Overall, the scores confirmed that the proposed device is highly wearable and comfortable, highlighting its suitability for everyday use in patient care.

Reliability and validity analyses of the postoperative comfort scale for patients with lung cancer undergoing endoscopic surgery and an evaluation of patient comfort.

BACKGROUND: Lung cancer is one of the most common malignant tumours that threaten human health globally. Radical resection under thoracoscopic guidance has been accepted as the major therapeutic option for treating lung cancer clinically. However, the procedure still has some adverse impacts on the comfort of patients following thoracoscopic surgery. OBJECTIVE: To analyse the reliability and validity of the postoperative comfort scale for patients with lung cancer undergoing endoscopic surgery and to evaluate patient comfort. METHODS: With 210 patients with lung cancer undergoing endoscopic surgery as the participants, this study was performed to assess the reliability and validity of the postoperative comfort scale for patients with lung cancer undergoing endoscopic surgery, with the assessment performed by eight experts. RESULTS: The postoperative comfort scale included 28 items and consisted of four dimensions (physiological, psychological, socio-cultural and environmental). The total Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the scale was 0.851, and the split-half reliability coefficient was 0.875. Meanwhile, the content validity index (CVI) was 0.875∼1, and the scale-level average CVI was 0.99. The Chi-square/degree-of-freedom ratio of construct validity was 2.844, suggesting a good model-fitting. Furthermore, the overall average score of patient comfort was 3.72 ± 0.57, with scores ranging between 3.59 ± 0.71 and 3.83 ± 1.06 across all four dimensions, with the lowest score in the physiological dimension. CONCLUSION: The postoperative comfort scale has good reliability and validity and can be applied for the postoperative comfort assessment of patients undergoing endoscopic surgery for lung cancer. Overall, the degree of patient comfort in this assessment was moderate, meaning targeted measures may be required to further improve patient comfort, especially in the physiological dimension.