Development of a Novel Low-Cost Knee Brace to Quantify Human Knee Function During Dynamic Tasks: A Feasibility Study from the North-West Province

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Abstract
Tracking knee joint movement during activities of daily living can have the potential to transform the rehabilitation and functional assessment of patients. The present study evaluated the validity of a low-cost, instrumented knee brace to determine whether it was appropriate for the monitoring and quantification of human knee function during five activity-of-daily-living (ADL) tasks including walking, inclined walking, stepping, sitting, and object manipulation. A sensor platform was designed to acquire sagittal plane knee data from 13 healthy participants across five different tasks and compared to gold-standard motion analysis. The brace showed good-to-excellent validity (RMSE: 4.97–8.65°), with differences in knee joint angles and angular velocities noted during various ADLs, specifically during early and late portions of a given movement. The results for instantaneous knee joint angles and angular velocities were very similar to those of the gold-standard system (mean bias: 0.59–9.52°·s−1), which may be applicable to everyday movement tasks, but may preclude analyses at a clinical level. Although the low-cost sensor platform shows promise an effective monitoring tool, it is not ready yet for a clinical application.

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