A Knee Sleeve Reinforced With Elastic Bands Reduces Muscular Efforts During Lower Limb Activities

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Knee pain is one of the most common symptoms caused by various diseases such as osteoarthritis (OA) and tendinitis. The most popular treatment for reducing knee pain is to use knee supporting devices, which include compressive sleeves, hinged braces, exoskeleton type devices and so forth. Among those, the compressive sleeve is the most preferred due to its simple and compact design that minimizes additional discomfort and is easy to use. However, the effectiveness of the compressive sleeve is naturally the lowest since it is the most compliant device having the smallest supportive force/torque to reduce muscular effort. To enhance the effectiveness of the compressive sleeve while maintaining the inherent comfort of the sleeve type brace, this study proposes to add elastic bands as a reinforcement. We started by investigating design factors such as material properties of varying elastic bands and the direction of band routing on the sleeve. Three healthy subjects gave signed consent approved by IRB at KAIST and participated in the study. First, 30 markers were attached on the skin around the knee joint to find the direction of maximum skin elongation for the optimal band route as the subjects performed sit-to-stand tasks. The optimal direction was found to be 64 degrees from the horizontal line connecting the medial and lateral epicondyle. Next, we prototyped a reinforced knee sleeve by sewing elastic bands (Thera-Band®, Hygenic Corp.) on a commercial compressive knee sleeve (Fig. 1). The elastic bands provides additional knee extension torque of 2.16 Nm which is 3.6 % of knee extension torque required to stand up from sit position for a 70kg person. Finally, we conducted an experiment to see how much muscular effort is reduced by the elastic band reinforcement. The three subjects conducted ten consecutive sit-to-stand tasks to a metronome while they wore the knee sleeve (with and without the reinforcing elastic bands) on the right leg (Fig. 2). Wireless sEMG sensors (Trigno™, Delsys) were attached on the rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, biceps femoris, and semitendinosus. To evaluate the reduction in knee extensor effort while normalizing the varying level of effort between each trial, the ratio between the RMS of the hamstring and quadriceps muscle groups (HQ ratio) was calculated. All subjects showed an increase in HQ ratio (mean: 22.3 %, standard deviation: 5.03) with the reinforced sleeve which implies the reinforcement reduced a significant amount of muscular effort. The experimental results suggest that the elastic band reinforcement makes the sleeve type device more effective by reducing muscular effort while maintaining the simplicity and comfort of a knee sleeve. Future works will focus on clinical evaluation of the reinforced knee sleeve.
Publisher
The Convention Centre Dublin
Issue Date
2018-07-10
Language
English
Citation

8th World Congress of Biomechanics

URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10203/249905
Appears in Collection
ME-Conference Papers(학술회의논문)
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