Human and biomechanical considerations in hand joint disease

Abstract

While public involvement has become increasingly important in the development, delivery and improvement of healthcare research, there remains limited evidence of its integration in biomechanical engineering research, despite its interrelatedness with healthcare. This thesis adopted an experiential approach to explore the integration of long-term public involvement into a biomechanical engineering doctoral research project concerning the hand joints. Hands play a crucial role in human life, allowing people to grasp, touch and manipulate the world around them. These abilities are impacted by conditions such as osteoarthritis (OA) which can cause pain and limit mobility. This doctoral research project was conceptualised to leverage an existing dataset of finger kinematics and imaging of ten consenting participants (free from hand or wrist disease or injury), using computational methods. Early-stage public involvement consultations with three public contributors, living with hand OA, highlighted key research considerations and encouraged the expansion of the public involvement efforts throughout the project. As a result, the project’s efforts and the selected methodologies were informed by three contributor-recommended research priorities. These priorities included: (1) patient variability, (2) joint instability and (3) raising hand OA awareness.This thesis provided a first-hand account of involving members of the public in biomechanical engineering research. Their involvement guided the utilization and processing of the pre-existing datasets and inspired broader impacts beyond the computational modelling efforts. As a result, this research produced a combination of biomechanical findings and public-centred outcomes, including open-source statistical shape models of the fingers, correlation markers between finger joint kinematics and shape information, and educational and dissemination materials for both public and academic audiences. While there remains a need for an improved infrastructure for integrating public involvement in quantitative-based research fields, where it is currently limited, this thesis acts as an in-depth case study, highlighting the associated successes and challenges while encouraging further exploration and integration