Acoustic Monitoring of Joint Health

The joints of the human body, especially the knees, are continually exposed to varying loads as a person goes about their day. These loads may contribute to damage to tissues including cartilage and the development of degenerative medical conditions such as osteoarthritis (OA). The most commonly used method currently for classifying the severity of knee OA is the Kellgren and Lawrence system, whereby a grade (a KL score) from 0 to 4 is determined based on the radiographic evidence. However, radiography cannot directly depict cartilage damage, and there is low inter-observer precision with this method. As such, there has been a significant activity to find non-invasive and radiation-free methods to quantify OA, in order to facilitate the diagnosis and the appropriate course of medical action and to validate the development of therapies in a research or clinical setting. A number of different teams have noted that variation in knee joint sounds during different loading conditions may be indicative of structural changes within the knee potentially linked to OA. Here we will review the use of acoustic methods, such as acoustic Emission (AE) and vibroarthrography (VAG), developed for the monitoring of knee OA, with a focus on the issues surrounding data collection and analysis.

Real-Time Capable Sensor Data Analysis-Framework for Intelligent Assistance Systems

In the industrialized countries, the very old part of the population has been growing rapidly for many years. In the next few years in particular, the age cohort over 65 will increase significantly. This goes hand in hand with illnesses and other physical and cognitive limitations. In order to enable these people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible despite physical and cognitive restrictions, technologies are being used to create ambient assisted living applications. However, most of these systems are neither medically verified nor are latencies short enough, for example, to avoid falls. In order to overcome these problems, a promising approach is to use the new 5G network technology. Combined with a suitable sensor data analysis frame work, the fast care project showed that a real-time situation picture of the patient in the form of an Avatar could be generated. The sensor structure records the heart rate, the breathing rate, analyzes the gait and measures the temperature, the VOC content of the room air, and its humidity. An emergency button has also been integrated. In a laboratory demonstrator, it was shown that the infrastructure realizes a real-time visualization of the sensor data over a heterogeneous network.