2017 - Case 8 - Seko: Smart Knee Brace Used During Rehabilitation After Knee Arthroplasty.
Channel: Jelle Saldien
Date: 03/02/2023

In this project, we describe the development of a smart brace a patient can wear after knee arthroplasty. This brace monitors the rehabilitation process and at the same time provides the patient with the needed feedback during prescribed physiotherapy exercises. It often happens that patients don’t comply with given prescriptions. When a patient then fails to recover the therapist is left thinking the reason is because of bad treatment. The brace described in this study uses multiple sensors that gather data of the movements done by the patient. This data is then used in two ways. One is for the therapist to keep track of the rehabilitation by creating an overview of all the data gathered in a web application and the other is to aid the patient when being at home by using a mobile application. This way the therapist knows what the patient has done during his rehabilitation and can adjust the given treatment accordingly while at the same time the patient knows exactly what to do during his exercises. This can result in an improved recovery of which both patient and therapist benefit. We based our selection of sensors and electronics on three possible exercises that can be given to a patient with knee arthroplasty. Based on the movements done during ’heel slides’, ’ankle pumps’ and ’thigh squeezes’ we selected appropriate sensors that were able to measure these movements. The result is a combination of sensors that can be used to implement a wide variety of exercises. The prototype we eventually made functioned as we assumed. Everything could be measured and could also be send to the application on the smartphone. Eventually, in the end, everything could also be read out by the therapist. However, it remains a prototype and for it to be implemented in a real brace that can be used by a patient it will need some more improvements, especially hardware-based. The compartment with all the electronics, for example, could be made more compact and the battery needs to be re-dimensioned to ensure longer life-time. Overall, what we prototyped remains successful and can be an interesting product once developed further.