Constructing a Home Based Knee Replacement Exercise Monitoring System with G Sensor
As Taiwan enters an aging society, osteoarthritis (OA) has become a common chronic disease among the elderly population. Knee is the most predilection site of OA. In the later stages of OA, knee replacement surgery is considered the best treatment of OA. A complete course of treatment, however, does not end once the operation is over; instead, it includes the follow up rehabilitation exercise, tracks and observation. Rehabilitation exercise requires patient cooperation to continue with the rehabilitation at home. Due to various factors, however, many patients are unable to carry out the rehabilitation adequately to ensure satisfactory results. Hence, it is important to have a home based rehabilitation system that could enable the communication between the patients and their doctors, and record the information about their rehabilitation. The system developed in this study uses a 3 Axis G Sensor to measure the knee angles during the rehabilitation, and uses Bluetooth to transmit the rehabilitation data to the computer. The data are then stored in a cloud database and are presented visually in the back end. The physiatrists in the hospital have real time access to and monitor every patient in their course of rehabilitation, thus giving them prompt feedbacks. The proposed remote rehabilitation platform makes it possible for patients and doctors to improve the quality of home rehabilitation after knee replacement surgery.