“Smart” Applications for Monitoring Percutaneous, Osseointegrated Implants

Abstract

Percutaneous, osseointegrated implants (POIs)) are becoming more widely used in surgical implant procedures due to their ability to be directly attached to the skeletal structure. As these implants make their way through early-stage patient trials, there is an opportunity to use ideas from the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). SHM data-to-decision workflows provide a technological basis of detecting, estimating, and reporting conditions that could assist physicians and patients in producing actionable information. This particular work presents a computational study on how optimallyembedded strain sensors may be applied in-situ to estimate implant loads, which has implications on verifying both patient rehabilitation compliance and state awareness in the implant connection. An objective function based on a surrogate for Bayes risk is developed to derive the optimal strain sensing strategy