DSAIL ORTHOPEDIA

By: Clinton Mwangi, Antony M. Gitau
Knee Rehabilitation Wearable Device

Background

The knee bears most of the weight of a human body. This makes the knee prone to many healthcare conditions. Knee pain is a common problem. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, major causes of knee pain include obesity, injury, aging, and repeated stress. Treatment varies depending on the cause of the knee pain. Surgery treatment is a common method. For example, total knee replacement (TKR) is an effective procedure done on osteoarthritis patients. However, TKR patients suffer from knee stiffness and reduced knee flexion of less than 90°, therefore they need physiotherapy sessions. Indeed, restricted postoperative knee flexion is the most frequent complication after TKR procedures and it is also the main cause of patient dissatisfaction.

Accomplishments

This project aims to solve this problem by offering a lightweight, cost-effective knee wearable device that accurately records, stores, and displays the flexion knee angles of the patients. So far, we have developed the first version of the product. This version can measure the knee flexion angle, save the angles in a time-series database and display them on a gauge plot.

Next Steps

Future work involves integrating more functionalities on the wearable device to get gait data of a recovering patient. Additionally, using these data to draw descriptive analytics to help doctors make more informed treatment decisions is also part of the future plan.

Publications