System Performance and User Feedback Regarding Wearable Bioimpedance System for Multi-Site Knee Tissue Monitoring: Free-Living Pilot Study With Healthy Adults.

Abstract

Knee-focused wearable devices have the potential to support personalized rehabilitation therapies by monitoring localized tissue alterations related to activities that reduce functional symptoms and pain. However, supporting these applications requires reported data to be reliable and accurate which can be challenging in the unsupervised free-living conditions that wearable devices are deployed. This pilot study has assessed a knee-focused wearable sensor system to quantify 1) system performance (operation, rates of data artifacts, environment impacts) to estimate realistic targets for reliable data with this system and 2) user experiences (comfort, fit, usability) to help inform future designs to increase usability and adoption of knee-focused wearables. Study data was collected from five healthy adult participants over 2 days, with 84.5 and 35.9% of artifact free data for longitudinal and transverse electrode configurations. Small to moderate positive correlations were also identified between changes in resistance, temperature, and humidity with respect to acceleration to highlight how this system can be used to explore relationships between knee tissues and environmental/activity context.