Purpose This systematic review aims to elucidate a non-operative rehabilitation program that optimizes recovery based on published approaches and outcomes. Methods Searches of four databases from inception to 1 January 2020 were performed to identify clinical studies addressing the non-operative management of simple elbow dislocations. Results Of 2435 studies that were eligible for title screen, 15 studies satisfied inclusion criteria. Three randomized control studies demonstrated that early mobilization expedited the return of range of motion, function and return to work or activities, however, resulted in increased pain within the six-week rehabilitation period compared to Plaster of Paris casting for 21 days. Patients returned to work sooner after early mobilization (10 vs. 18 days; p = 0.02) compared to Plaster of Paris casting. In all studies, early mobilization resulted in similar re-dislocation rates of 1.3% (3/237) versus 2.2% (12/549) in those with Plaster of Paris casting as well as lower incidence of heterotopic ossification (36% vs. 54%). No significant differences between rehabilitation protocols were determined; however, the large majority of recent papers utilized rehabilitation protocols. Conclusion Early mobilization of simple elbow dislocations results in early return of Range-of-Motion, function and return to work with no increase in complication rates; however, increased pain during the rehabilitation period.

Pressure injuries are largely preventable, yet they affect one in four Canadians across all healthcare settings. A key best practice to prevent and treat pressure injuries is to minimize prolonged tissue deformation by ensuring at-risk individuals are repositioned regularly (typically every 2 hours). However, adherence to repositioning is poor in clinical settings and expected to be even worse in homecare settings. Our team has designed a position detection system for home use that uses machine learning approaches to predict a patient's position in bed using data from load cells under the bed legs. The system predicts the patient's position as one of three position categories: left-side lying, right-side lying, or supine. The objectives of this project were to: i) determine if measuring ground truth patient position with an inertial measurement unit can improve our system accuracy (predicting left-side lying, right-side lying, or supine) ii) to determine the range of transverse pelvis angles (TPA) that fully offloaded each of the great trochanters and sacrum and iii) evaluate the potential benefit of being able to predict the individual's position with higher precision (classifying position into more than three categories) by taking into account a potential drop in prediction accuracy as well as the range of TPA for which the greater trochanters and sacrum were fully offloaded. Data from 18 participants was combined with previous data sets to train and evaluate classifiers to predict the participants' TPA using four different position bin sizes (~70°), 45°, ~30°, and 15°) and the effects of increasing precision on performance, where patients are left side-lying at -90°, right side-lying at 90° and supine at 0°). A leave-one-participant-out cross validation approach was used to select the best performing classifier, which was found to have an accuracy of 84.03% with an F1 score of 0.8399. Skin-bed interface forces were measured using force sensitive resistors placed on the greater trochanters and sacrum. Complete offloading for the sacrum was only achieved for the positions with TPA angles <-90° or >90°, indicating there was no benefit to predicting with greater precision than with three categories: left, right, and supine.