System Performance and User Feedback Regarding Wearable Bioimpedance System for Multi-Site Knee Tissue Monitoring: Free-Living Pilot Study With Healthy Adults

Abstract

Knee-focused wearable devices have the potential to support personalized rehabilitation therapies by monitoring localized tissue alterations related to activities that reduce functional symptoms and pain. However, supporting these applications requires reported data to be reliable and accurate which can be challenging in the unsupervised free-living conditions that wearable devices are deployed. This pilot study has assessed a knee-focused wearable sensor system to quantify 1) system performance (operation, rates of data artifacts, environment impacts) to estimate realistic targets for reliable data with this system and 2) user experiences (comfort, fit, usability) to help inform future designs to increase usability and adoption of knee-focused wearables. Study data was collected from five healthy adult participants over 2 days, with 84.5 and 35.9% of artifact free data for longitudinal and transverse electrode configurations. Small to moderate positive correlations were also identified between changes in resistance, temperature, and humidity with respect to acceleration to highlight how this system can be used to explore relationships between knee tissues and environmental/activity context.

Localized Multi-Site Knee Bioimpedance as a Predictor for Knee Osteoarthritis Associated Pain Within Older Adults During Free-Living

“…Localized knee-tissue bioimpedance data was collected from study participants using an electronic sensing system integrated into a commercially available textile knee brace (Swede-O Thermal Vent Open Knee Wrap Stabilizer). This sensing platform and wearable device have been validated during bench-top laboratory testing [26] and during free-living use by healthy adults [27] . The complete technical details of the wearable sensing system are available for interested readers [27] , with a short technical summary presented here.…”

“…This sensing platform and wearable device have been validated during bench-top laboratory testing [26] and during free-living use by healthy adults [27] . The complete technical details of the wearable sensing system are available for interested readers [27] , with a short technical summary presented here. Multi-frequency (8 kHz to 128 kHz) bioimpedance measurements were collected from two sites of the knee by the sensing platform.…”

“…If the answer to any step was “no” the data was classified as an artifact and removed from further processing. Further details about this process are provided in [27] , [32] for interested readers. To illustrate this process, Fig.…”