AirPacks ® System: Preventing Injuries through Improved Backpack Design
By Jason A. Zwiker
Parents agree: children should not be experiencing chronic pain in the lower back, pinched nerves that leave the fingertips tingling or aches and discomfort that limit mobility. Ask school nurses, emergency room physicians, chiropractors and physical therapists who treat children for these symptoms, however, and a painful truth emerges: back and neck injuries are on the rise among kids and the bulky, overloaded backpacks that they constantly lug around are often to blame.
The concept for the AirPacks System came from the simple observation that there are better, more body-friendly and natural, ways to design a backpack. The AirPacks design shifts the weight onto parts of the body, such as the hips and legs that could better support it and prevents damaging pinching and binding from occurring. Developed in cooperation with orthopedic professionals and clinically tested, the AirPacks System has been found to reduce backpack-related stress on the body by up to 80 percent and the effective load by up to 50 percent. A study by Northeastern University found that students who switched to AirPacks for six weeks experienced, on average, a 50 percent reduction in pain.
“Our focus is on self-help,” says Phil Mattison of Core Products, which has the exclusive license for marketing the AirPacks System in the Healthcare Industry and Specialty Retail. “Prevention is the best option for taking better care of ourselves and that’s what the AirPacks System offers: a way to prevent these injuries before they occur.”
Prevention is of key importance when discussing the spine in any age group, of course, but especially so with children. “As childhood is a key time for spinal growth and development and many health care providers are concerned that repetitive and preventable injuries may lead to long-term health problems later on in life,” according to Mattison.
“Heavy backpacks have an obstructive impact on the posture and spinal health of children,” says Dr. Jerry DeGrado, National Backpack Safety Chairman of the Congress of Chiropractic State Associations. “By national guidelines, individuals should be carrying no more than 10 to 15 percent of their body weight around with them.” Yet, according to a study by Simmons College, more than half of all students are exceeding those recommendations, some excessively, hauling packs that tip the scales at fully 20 to 25 percent of their body weight. That’s equivalent to a 200-pound adult man slinging 40 to 50 pounds on his back, hauling it around, setting it down and picking it back up all through the day. That’s going to lead straight to pain - and lots of it!
The AirPacks System is distinguished by an ergonomic design, with wide shoulder straps and a lumbar air cushion that transfers the weight of the pack’s contents to the top of the hips. This allows the weight to be carried partially by the body’s structure. The AirPacks come in three sizes – small, medium, and large – so they may be individually fit to the child. “We want the lumbar cushion to fall right into the small of the back, just above the hip,” says Mattison. “That allows it to rest comfortably and to transfer the weight effectively.” When properly sized to the child, the AirPacks System actually creates a fulcrum that promotes an upright standing position, improving the child’s posture along with preventing injury. “The most important consideration for the consumer is selecting the correct size for their child.” Easy-to-understand charts in the Core Products patient brochures and their customer service representatives make this simple.
Of course, the natural tendency of children to overlook or improperly use safety devices is understood. That’s where the real beauty of the design comes in. “We know that kids are going to be taking these packs on and off frequently and they’re just not going to take the time to strap anything around their waist,” says Mattison. The AirPacks System was designed with this in mind, so that even if kids, being kids, just throw one on their shoulder, wearing either one or two straps, the lumbar cushion should still fall on the top of the hip, right where it should be.
Along with a well-designed backpack such as the AirPacks System, it is essential, according to DeGrado, to increase public awareness of the various factors contributing to backpack injury among children as well as to provide education on how to best use the packs for prevention. What are some of the reasons for the ever-increasing amount of “stuff” a child is lugging back and forth to school each day and is there anything that can be done to lessen this burden?
One factor involves the traditional school locker that most of us are familiar with. As school districts become increasingly concerned with security issues, the locker is becoming less and less common. Unfortunately, without a secure place to store their books and supplies, the burden of hauling these around falls on the individual student.
With as many as 7,500 students across the country being treated for backpack related injuries each year, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, clinicians, lawmakers, and school boards alike have begun to weigh in on the issue. Proposals that have been suggested, according to DeGrado, include school districts issuing separate sets of heavy textbooks for in-school and at-home use, setting maximum weight standards for textbooks, and e-text or online textbook options. Some proposed solutions, such as the use of rolling backpacks, have been found to present problems of their own, such as creating tripping hazards in the hallways of crowded schools. With school districts facing limited budgets, it is likely that the issue of students being required to carry a large number of books and supplies on a daily basis will continue for the foreseeable future, making preventive measures for protecting their developing spines an important and ongoing concern.
Of course, textbooks and essentials aren’t the only items finding their way into the packs and so there are several things that can be done to improve the immediate situation. “Really, kids are placing everything back there from their textbooks and iPod to their skates and skateboards,” says Dr. DeGrado, who has seen firsthand how overloaded and cumbersome backpacks can lead to pain and injury. “They’ll attach anything if they can.”
In addition to choosing an ergonomic pack such as AirPacks, he recommends that parents assist their children in looking through the contents of the backpack and deciding what is needed and what is simply adding excess weight and bulk. Helping the children understand how extra weight is contributing to their back pain makes the process easier.
Once the weight has been minimized, the next step is to show the child how to properly load the pack. “The heaviest objects should be closest to the body,” says Mattison. “Because that weight acts as a lever arm. If it shifts far enough away from your spine, it can flip you right over.” Place the heavier items on the bottom and closest to the body and reserve the lighter items for the top and further from the body. Once the pack is loaded, side straps on the AirPacks allow the load to be cinched tightly, compressing the depth of the pack. Mattison notes that this is similar to the methods used by serious hikers who must carry outdoors supplies in a backpack for long distances, often straight up the side of a mountain.
“Our mission is to continue to manufacture and market the kind of products that health care providers would want to recommend to their patients,” Mattison says of the ongoing interest Core Products has shown in continuing to research and develop ways to improve on the AirPacks System. “We’re also surveying parents and kids to find out what would make the packs more user-friendly, what colors they would like to see, and what features we should add to future models.”
The category of preventive and alternative care is becoming ever larger. While once chiropractors and physical therapists represented the main group of providers that Core Products worked with in manufacturing and marketing preventive and therapeutic devices, today a far larger group, including massage therapists and sports medicine specialists, are expressing interest in how they can help their clients obtain the best self-care products.
Public interest in self-care products continues to rise as more and more people become aware of the cost effectiveness of prevention. “People are finding that using a system such as AirPacks, together with an understanding of how to properly load the pack, is similar to the way that athletes will wrap their ankles prior to a competition,” Mattison adds. “Why do athletes go through the trouble of wrapping a perfectly healthy ankle? They do it because they understand that it costs less to prevent an injury than to treat it. The same is true of protecting the back, spine and neck.”
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This feature article was independently researched and prepared by Jason A. Zwiker, a freelance writer commissioned by Core Products International, Inc. Jason has over ten years of experience in the medical and public health fields, working with orthopedic surgeons, sleep therapists, and other specialists, and has written about health and wellness for several national, regional and trade publications.
For more information on AirPacks:
Willie Doyle
Core Products International, Inc.
808 Prospect Avenue
Osceola, WI 54020
800.365.3047 x 551
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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