Assessing and improving mobility in older adults using a smart knee monitoring system

Maintaining optimal mobility with relative ease and freedom of movement is key to healthy aging. The knee joint, being the primary bearer of the body weight, plays a vital role in mobility. Monitoring the knee joint can potentially provide important quantitative information related to mobility. With the support of Labarge funding, the team is developing a comfortable, wearable and easy-to-use sensing device to monitor knee-related problems in real-time. The team’s objective is to develop a smart wearable knee-joint device for mobility monitoring and early diagnosis of mobility-related problems among older adults by combining the analyzed data with input from clinical and business collaborators. The team has now conducted a detailed literature review on joint monitoring and designed a sensing system by fusing different types of sensors (such as pressure and temperature). The resulting wearable wireless knee monitoring system is simple, easy‐to‐use, cost-effective, non-invasive and unobtrusive. The team will now collect data using the monitoring system and work with clinicians to interpret the data in a way that will provide useful information about the overall mobility status of the individual.

“The Labarge funding has contributed towards our goal of developing the smart wearable knee sensing system to be used for monitoring assessing and improving mobility in older adults.”