Fun-Knee™: A novel smart knee sleeve for Total-Knee-Replacement rehabilitation with gamification

Total Knee Replacement (TKR) is an increasingly common surgery worldwide. A significant contributor to TKR success is post-surgical rehabilitation. In this work, we present Fun-Knee™, a novel sensor-equipped knee support complemented by mobile device-supported games, specifically designed for “gamified” TKR rehabilitation. Two inclinometers are used to measure the knee angle, which is used as the main input to the developed game. Human-Centered Design theory is applied throughout the game design to ensure a customized, dynamic gaming experience to maximize the pain distraction effect and to increase the exercise compliance and improve the rehabilitation outcome. Preliminary survey results collected from practicing physiotherapists show promising outcomes of the developed prototype, in terms of hardware and software characteristics, usability, clinical utility and overall effectiveness

Using Non-Traditional Interfaces to Support Physical Therapy for Knee Strengthening

Physical therapy consists mainly in the execution of rehabilitation processes that aim to help overcome injuries, as well as develop, maintain, or restore maximum body movement. Knee rehabilitation is one kind of physical therapy that requires daily exercises which could be considered monotonous and boring by the patients, discouraging their improvement. This is coupled with the fact that most physical therapists assess exercise performance through verbal and visual means with mostly manual measurements, making it difficult to constantly verify and validate if patients perform the exercises correctly. This article describes a physical therapy monitoring system that uses wearable technology to assess exercise performance and patient progress. This wearable device is able to measure and transfer the movement’s data from the patient’s limb to a mobile device. Moreover, the user interface is a game, which provides an entertaining approach to therapy exercising. In this article, it is shown that the developed system significantly increases daily user engagement in rehabilitation exercises, through a gameplay that matches physical therapy requirements for knee rehabilitation, as well as offering useful quantitative information to therapistsUniversidad de Costa Rica/[834-B4-159]/UCR/Costa RicaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ingeniería::Centro de Investigaciones en Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación (CITIC)UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ingeniería::Facultad de Ingeniería::Escuela de Ciencias de la Computación e Informátic