Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to access personal health data with the Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and other biosensor-based products. In the field of dance medicine, researchers are also using this technology to better understand the dancing body. Kaitlyn Kumar, a dancer and a master’s student in robotics at Johns Hopkins University, says that while artists generally value their own deeply nuanced understanding of their physiques, “technology is just another tool to understand what’s going on with a specific dancer’s body.”
Access to more in-depth health data has the potential to be a game changer for researching and treating dancers. Here are a few ways biosensors have been used to expand research in dance medicine.
What Are Biosensors?
Biosensors are devices designed to measure real-time processes and responses within the body, like a person’s heart rate, blood oxygen level, and sleep quality. “They allow us to see the unseen without invasive processes,” says Dr. Jatin Ambegaonkar, a professor of athletic training with the Sports Medicine Assessment, Research, and Testing Laboratory in the School of Kinesiology at George Mason University and the editor in chief of the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science. Biosensors are worn on the outside of the body and can take many forms. They can be as simple as a heart-rate monitor, as common as a smartwatch, or more specialized for medical settings, like an electromyography test, which measures muscle activity.
Ambegaonkar explains that biosensors are a relatively recent development in the history of medical technology. And while they have been used for the past 60 to 70 years in the larger medical field, they’ve only been applied in dance medicine for the past 15 to 20.
Dr. Jatin Ambegaonkar. Photo by Dr. Jena Hansen-Honeycutt, Courtesy George Mason University.
Dance World Applications
The potential applications for bio- sensors in dance medicine are diverse and wide-ranging. One example is PointeSense, designed to track a dancer’s foot alignment during pointework through a multi-sensor pointe shoe insert, which Kumar is developing with Christine Fernandez, a fellow dancer and biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins. Electronics within the insert detect changes in pressure, which then are translated to numeric data that can be analyzed to improve pointe technique and prevent misalignment or injury. “PointeSense has the potential to show things that are happening inside the shoe that are normally difficult or impossible to see on the outside,” says Fernandez.
Ambegaonkar (left) using 3-D motion sensing to examine joint motion in a patient. Photo by George Mason University Creative Services, Courtesy GMU.
Ambegaonkar has also used biosensors to study the impact of landing from jumps, as well as the correlation between physical and mental stress and sleep in a group of college dancers. In his study of the latter, Ambegaonkar found that the dancers were sleeping, on average, around six hours per night, which is less than the recommended seven to nine hours. They also had a higher than average daily level of physical activity. “The biosensor technology told us, across the phases of the day—whether rehearsal or class or performance—how the dancers were actually moving, and what spaces were causing physical stress to their body,” Ambegaonkar says. He is currently building on the sleep and activity study to understand the correlation between sleep patterns and injury exposure, and to develop strategies to improve dancers’ rest.
Looking Ahead
In addition to use as injury-prevention tools, Ambegaonkar says that biosensors also have potential applications in performance optimization, helping dancers improve strength, range of motion, and even artistry. “Imagine there is a fantastic piece of choreography that requires the dancers to glide across the stage, and there are some dancers who can do that and some dancers who cannot,” he says. “By using biosensors, we can track the movements of a better-looking aesthetic versus an aesthetic that needs to be improved, and we can compare the two to help the dancers get to the place they need to be.”
Kumar also sees the potential for biosensors to help extend performance careers, through the development of applications designed to help mitigate injuries. Fernandez proposes that they could help fill a technical gap for adult ballet students, who may have less access to educational resources on pointe technique than younger dancers.
“This (research) coincides with a broader shift in the dance world at large. I feel like we’re seeing, generally, more interest in what the body and muscles are actually doing,” says Fernandez. “As dancers, we rely on our proprioception and our intuition to know what’s going on,” Kumar adds. “Sometimes it’s nice to be able to look at the data, too.”
Kaitlyn Kumar (left) and Christine Fernandez. Photo by Hub Yeo, Courtesy Kumar.
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