The subject of this project is to design and implement a home monitoring system for patients with knee rehabilitation recovering after surgery. Usually they go to hospital for exercising and they are monitored by physicians to assure that their knee performs enough degree of flexion (i.e., they can bend their knee and improve it over the exercise course). However, this costs the patients and the hospital a lot of money. Thus, developing a system to monitor patients’ knee angle while they are exercising at home without goingto the hospital will be vital.
We have developed a system that comprises of a brace, a magnetic angle encoder, and a microcontroller that can measure the knee angle during the exercise session and send it to the hospital. The patients wear on a brace during the exercise and the microcontroller measures the current knee angle and send it to a smart phone via Bluetooth port. The transmitted angle is stored in the smart phone and the maximum and minimum knee angles during an exercise session are calculated and sent to a server housed at the University of Denver. The maximum and minimum angles are the two important signatures that show patient’s improvement (knee flexion) after a knee surgery.
Related Publications:
- S. Bakhshi and M.H. Mahoor, “Development of a Wearable Sensor System for Measuring Body Joint Flexion”, In the proceedings of the Body Sensor Networks (BSN) Conference, Dallas, May 23-25, 2011.
- Saba Bakhshi, Mohammad H. Mahoor, and Bradley S. Davidson, “DEVELOPMENT OF A BODY JOINT ANGLE MEASUREMENT SYSTEM USING IMU SENSORS”, the 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC ’11), Boston, Aug. 30th-Sep. 3rd, 2011.