scholarly journals Design and Development of Valgus-Sensing Leggings

Author(s):  
Robert Pettys-Baker ◽  
Crystal Compton ◽  
Sophia Utset-Ward ◽  
Marc Tompkins ◽  
Brad Holschuh ◽  
...  

Performing exercises, especially cutting and pivoting activities, with poor lower extremity mechanics can lead to severe damage of the knee, such as anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tears [1]. A common movement pattern observed in at-risk athletes is knee valgus. This term refers to the medial collapse of the knee (when the knees falls inward towards the center of the body). Intervention to prevent knee valgus could reduce the chance of injury for at-risk athletes, or re-injury for those recovering from a knee injury. Currently, in patients with knee injuries, knee valgus is monitored by physical therapists, who observe a patient’s movements visually during exercise. The therapists instruct patients on how to identify valgus and how they might correct it. Visual diagnosis of valgus can be difficult and subjective, thereby allowing the unavoidable presence of human error. In addition, monitoring in real time is only possible when the patient is with a therapist. Several studies have focused on the issue of accurate detection of knee valgus by using a variety of systems such as 2D and 3D motion capture systems to track knee and hip movements, dynamometers, and electromyography [2][3][4]. Although these systems are able to determine knee valgus, they are difficult to use, require expensive equipment, and do not provide real-time feedback outside of the clinic setting. The purpose of this study was to inform the design of a valgus-sensing legging by exploring sensor placement options to maximize the magnitude of the sensor response difference between valgus and non-valgus knee bends.

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven H. Ryder ◽  
Robert J. Johnson ◽  
Bruce D. Beynnon ◽  
Carl F. Ettlinger

Athletes are particularly at risk for anterior cruciate ligament injury, and there is some evidence that female athletes are more at risk than males. The conflicting principles of stability and mobility are at odds within the knee, setting the stage for potentially serious injuries. Some investigators suggest that the size of the intercondylar notch should be used to identify athletes at risk for ACL damage, but more research is required before clinical decisions can be based on notch width measurements. Athletic shoe modifications and artificial playing surfaces may influence the incidence of ACL injures. Functional knee braces appear to have beneficial strain shielding effect on the ACL for anterior directed loads and internal–external torques applied to the tibia, but this effect appears to decrease as the magnitude of these anterior directed loads and torques increases. Ski equipment is often pointed to as a contributing factor in ACL injuries, but there is no evidence that modifications in ski equipment will decrease ACL disruptions. An education program based on recognizing the events that lead to ACL injury in skiing may reduce knee injuries in the future.


Author(s):  
Chi-Yin Tse ◽  
Ashkan Vaziri ◽  
Paul K. Canavan ◽  
Ruben Goebel ◽  
Hamid Nayeb-Hashemi

Increased knee valgus loading has been previously identified as a possible risk factor for non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury. Arm position during landing may affect the risk of injury by increasing the knee valgus load. The goal of this study was to examine the kinematics and kinetics of the knee joint during single-leg drop landings from platform heights that was subject specific. Ten subjects (5 female, 5 male) were selected to participate in this single-leg landing study. No significant difference in knee kinematics was noted between arm positions, or gender. Significant difference (p < 0.05) was noted in the varus/valgus knee angle at initial contact (VVIC) when comparing the 60% vertical max jump percentage (%VJMax) to the 80% VJMax and 100% VJMax.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5536
Author(s):  
Ádám Uhlár ◽  
Mira Ambrus ◽  
Márton Kékesi ◽  
Eszter Fodor ◽  
László Grand ◽  
...  

(1) Dynamic knee valgus is a predisposing factor for anterior cruciate ligament rupture and osteoarthritis. The single-leg squat (SLS) test is a widely used movement pattern test in clinical practice that helps to assess the risk of lower-limb injury. We aimed to quantify the SLS test using a marker-less optical system. (2) Kinect validity and accuracy during SLS were established by marker-based OptiTrack and MVN Xsens motion capture systems. Then, 22 individuals with moderate knee symptoms during sports activities (Tegner > 4, Lysholm > 60) performed SLS, and this was recorded and analyzed with a Kinect Azure camera and the Dynaknee software. (3) An optical sensor coupled to an artificial-intelligence-based joint recognition algorithm gave a comparable result to traditional marker-based motion capture devices. The dynamic valgus sign quantified by the Q-angle at the lowest point of the squat is highly dependent on squat depth, which severely limits its comparability among subjects. In contrast, the medio-lateral shift of the knee midpoint at a fixed squat depth, expressed in the percentage of lower limb length, is more suitable to quantify dynamic valgus and compare values among individual patients. (4) The current study identified a new and reliable way of evaluating dynamic valgus of the knee joint by measuring the medial shift of the knee-over-foot at a standardized squat depth. Using a marker-less optical system widens the possibilities of evaluating lower limb functional instabilities for medical professionals.


Author(s):  
Jahwan Koo ◽  
Nawab Muhammad Faseeh Qureshi ◽  
Isma Farah Siddiqui ◽  
Asad Abbas ◽  
Ali Kashif Bashir

Abstract Real-time data streaming fetches live sensory segments of the dataset in the heterogeneous distributed computing environment. This process assembles data chunks at a rapid encapsulation rate through a streaming technique that bundles sensor segments into multiple micro-batches and extracts into a repository, respectively. Recently, the acquisition process is enhanced with an additional feature of exchanging IoT devices’ dataset comprised of two components: (i) sensory data and (ii) metadata. The body of sensory data includes record information, and the metadata part consists of logs, heterogeneous events, and routing path tables to transmit micro-batch streams into the repository. Real-time acquisition procedure uses the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to extract live query outcomes from in-place micro-batches through MapReduce stages and returns a result set. However, few bottlenecks affect the performance during the execution process, such as (i) homogeneous micro-batches formation only, (ii) complexity of dataset diversification, (iii) heterogeneous data tuples processing, and (iv) linear DAG workflow only. As a result, it produces huge processing latency and the additional cost of extracting event-enabled IoT datasets. Thus, the Spark cluster that processes Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) in a fast-pace using Random access memory (RAM) defies expected robustness in processing IoT streams in the distributed computing environment. This paper presents an IoT-enabled Directed Acyclic Graph (I-DAG) technique that labels micro-batches at the stage of building a stream event and arranges stream elements with event labels. In the next step, heterogeneous stream events are processed through the I-DAG workflow, which has non-linear DAG operation for extracting queries’ results in a Spark cluster. The performance evaluation shows that I-DAG resolves homogeneous IoT-enabled stream event issues and provides an effective stream event heterogeneous solution for IoT-enabled datasets in spark clusters.


Author(s):  
Hamidreza Naserpour ◽  
Julien S. Baker ◽  
Amir Letafatkar ◽  
Giacomo Rossettini ◽  
Frédéric Dutheil

Karate training, despite the many positive health benefits, carries a risk of injury for participants. The current cross-sectional study aimed to investigate knee injury profiles among Iranian elite karatekas. Participants who attended the national team qualifiers, which included 390 male Kumite karatekas (age 24 ± 3 years old and weight 63 ± 12 kg), participated in this study. Information on knee injuries (injury history, type of injury mechanisms, and effects of knee symptoms on the ability to perform daily activities and recreational activities) were obtained using the Knee Outcome Survey (KOS). Using Pearson’s correlation coefficient, the study examined the relationships between different variables, including KOS subscales and levels of self-reported knee joint function. Our findings indicated that 287 karatekas (73.6%) experienced knee injuries. The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture (6.9%), articular cartilage (5.4%), and meniscus damage (3.8%) were the main typology of injury. In addition, there were no differences in knee injuries between the non-dominant and dominant legs. Most injuries occurred during the preparatory period (n = 162, 50%), especially during training periods. The KOS subscales scores (Mean ± Sd) for activities of daily living (ADL) and sports activity (SAS) were, respectively, 89 ± 11 and 91 ± 9. The self-reported scores for both the ADL and SAS subscales were, respectively, 89 ± 11 and 90 ± 10. Pearson coefficients of ADL and SAS subscales with their self-reported score were r = 0.761 (p < 0.0001) and r = 0.782 and (p < 0.0001), respectively. The profile of knee injuries in the current investigation is similar to previous surveys that reported lower extremity injury patterns. The findings of this study could be adopted to inform practice aimed at planning interventions for the reduction and prevention of knee injuries among karatekas.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1104
Author(s):  
Shin-Yan Chiou ◽  
Kun-Ju Lin ◽  
Ya-Xin Dong

Positron emission tomography (PET) is one of the commonly used scanning techniques. Medical staff manually calculate the estimated scan time for each PET device. However, the number of PET scanning devices is small, the number of patients is large, and there are many changes including rescanning requirements, which makes it very error-prone, puts pressure on staff, and causes trouble for patients and their families. Although previous studies proposed algorithms for specific inspections, there is currently no research on improving the PET process. This paper proposes a real-time automatic scheduling and control system for PET patients with wearable sensors. The system can automatically schedule, estimate and instantly update the time of various tasks, and automatically allocate beds and announce schedule information in real time. We implemented this system, collected time data of 200 actual patients, and put these data into the implementation program for simulation and comparison. The average time difference between manual and automatic scheduling was 7.32 min, and it could reduce the average examination time of 82% of patients by 6.14 ± 4.61 min. This convinces us the system is correct and can improve time efficiency, while avoiding human error and staff pressure, and avoiding trouble for patients and their families.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1431
Author(s):  
Ilkyu Kim ◽  
Sun-Gyu Lee ◽  
Yong-Hyun Nam ◽  
Jeong-Hae Lee

The development of biomedical devices benefits patients by offering real-time healthcare. In particular, pacemakers have gained a great deal of attention because they offer opportunities for monitoring the patient’s vitals and biological statics in real time. One of the important factors in realizing real-time body-centric sensing is to establish a robust wireless communication link among the medical devices. In this paper, radio transmission and the optimal characteristics for impedance matching the medical telemetry of an implant are investigated. For radio transmission, an integral coupling formula based on 3D vector far-field patterns was firstly applied to compute the antenna coupling between two antennas placed inside and outside of the body. The formula provides the capability for computing the antenna coupling in the near-field and far-field region. In order to include the effects of human implantation, the far-field pattern was characterized taking into account a sphere enclosing an antenna made of human tissue. Furthermore, the characteristics of impedance matching inside the human body were studied by means of inherent wave impedances of electrical and magnetic dipoles. Here, we demonstrate that the implantation of a magnetic dipole is advantageous because it provides similar impedance characteristics to those of the human body.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 347-360
Author(s):  
Julien Labia

A migrant camp is a ‘non-place’ where personal identity is put at risk. Music is a means of personal adaptation in camps, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. The present power of music in such a place is to create strong relationships, ‘shortcutting’ both narration and the longer time needed in order to create relationships. The kind of personal advantage it is for someone to be a musician is a topic surprisingly forgotten, obscured by theoretical habits of seeing music essentially as an expressive activity directed to an audience, or as being a communicative activity. Music has a performative power different from language, as a non-verbal art having a strong and direct relationship to the body. Musical interactions on the field give migrants the ability to balance their problematic situation of refugees, shaping a real present.


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