Rehabilitation exercise monitoring device for knee osteoarthritis patients

Abstract

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a joint disease that causes disability and joint irritation. Knee OA is known to be one of the most common OA type that happen in patient. The safest treatment to reduce the pain is by having the rehabilitation exercises. Normally, patients of knee OA will undergo prescribed physical activity treatment in the hospital using sophisticated and expensive rehabilitation equipment with monitoring by specialist. Another alternative is to conduct the rehabilitation exercises at home. However, improper exercise movement may cause further injury to the patient when doing it at home. In this project a rehabilitation exercise monitoring device for knee OA is proposed. Two accelerometers are used to obtain the data of body motion from the thigh and shank. Arduino is used to process the signal obtain from the accelerometers for exercise classification and detection of incorrect exercise movement with the use LEDs as indicators. Subject conducted two types of exercise which include the Short Arc Exercise (SAE) and Straight Leg Raise (SLR) to test the detection accuracy of the system. The system was able to detect both SAE and SLR exercises with 100% accuracy. However, the system was only able to detect improper exercises movement for SAE (100%) but with a lower accuracy to detect for SLR exercise, showing the lowest accuracy for subject A when the hip joint external rotation movement was out of the allowable range and when knee is not fully extended. Lastly, the average angle for improper exercises movement was able to determine with some variation angle for each error label. By implementing the rehabilitation monitoring system, specialist are able to monitor (offline) the performance of their patient when conducting the rehabilitation activities at home and the patient will able to get feedback their exercise movement.