Abstract
Continuous monitoring of knee motion can provide deep insights into patients’ rehabilitation status after knee injury and help to better identify their individual therapeutic needs. Potentiometers have been identified as one possible sensor type for continuous monitoring of knee motion. However, to verify their use in monitoring real-life environments, further research is needed. We aimed to validate a potentiometer-embedded knee brace to measure sagittal knee kinematics during various daily activities, as well as to assess its potential to continuously monitor knee motion. To this end, the sagittal knee motion of 32 healthy subjects was recorded simultaneously by an instrumented knee brace and an optoelectronic reference system during activities of daily living to assess the agreement between these two measurement systems. To evaluate the potentiometer’s behavior during continuous monitoring, knee motion was continuously recorded in a subgroup (n = 9) who wore the knee brace over the course of a day. Our results show a strong agreement between the instrumented knee brace and reference system across all investigated activities as well as stable sensor behavior during continuous tracking. The presented potentiometer-based sensor system demonstrates strong potential as a device for measuring sagittal knee motion during daily activities as well as for continuous knee motion monitoring.
Highlights
Knee ligament injuries are the most common knee injuries [1]
Amplitude scaling factors were close to the ideal output of 1 for all activities, with mean values of a1 ranging from 0.92 to 0.96 (n = 32)
The mean vertical angular displacement between the instrumented knee brace and the reference system for all activities ranged from a0 = 7.62◦ to a0 = 10.31◦ (n = 32) in S1 and a0 = 0.15◦ to a0 = 3.36◦ (n = 9) in session 2 (S2)
Summary
Knee ligament injuries are the most common knee injuries [1]. In addition to their acute impact on health, knee ligament injuries are potential risk factors for later knee osteoarthritis [2] and chronic balance impairments [3]. By offering additional and more extensive insights into patients’ rehabilitation statuses, patient monitoring has the potential to complement existing measures, such as questionnaires, ROM measurements, functional tests, or conventional gait analysis, for assessing knee joint functionality. Most of these existing methods can only capture a snapshot of the patients’ status, which may not reflect the patient’s natural movement behavior. On the other hand, could allow a continuous and more detailed reflection of the knee movement It may enable the detection of rare events or individual characteristic movement patterns, which may not be observed during brief assessments [7]. A crucial first step towards this goal is developing continuous knee motion monitoring systems and evaluating their reliability for measurements in real-life environments
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