{"id":68109,"date":"2021-07-30T15:37:45","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T19:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/?page_id=68109"},"modified":"2021-10-07T10:50:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-07T14:50:32","slug":"measuring-mobility-improvement","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/about-us\/our-publications\/inside-sargent\/inside-sargent-2021\/measuring-mobility-improvement\/","title":{"rendered":"Measuring Mobility Improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Deepak Kumar hopes that wearable sensors can measure knee osteoarthritis patients\u2019 improvements remotely.<\/div>\n

There isn\u2019t a cure for knee osteoarthritis, the debilitating condition where the joint\u2019s cushioning cartilage wears down. The treatment that has proven most effective for the disease, which causes painful friction between the bones and afflicts almost 14 million people in the United States, is exercise-based physical therapy. But, the problem is, it\u2019s difficult to accurately measure a patient\u2019s improvement outside of a clinical or laboratory setting. Deepak Kumar<\/a> wants to change that.<\/p>\n

An assistant professor of physical therapy, he’s started a new clinical trial to develop wearable sensor technology that can measure patients\u2019 improvement remotely.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are devices like the FitBit that measure how many steps a patient is walking every day, but they don\u2019t give us the information we need about the quality of their walking\u2014has their walking pattern changed, are they more symmetric, how much time are they spending on their painful knee versus their nonpainful knee,\u201d says Kumar, who is also the director of Sargent\u2019s Movement & Applied Imaging Lab<\/a>. \u201cThere just isn\u2019t a good way to get that information while the patients are out and about in their everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kumar and his coresearcher Tuhina Neogi, a professor of medicine and chief of rheumatology at Boston Medical Center (BMC), are collaborating with the BU Physical Therapy Center, BMC, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly on the clinical trial.<\/p>\n

For the study, participants wear a tiny sensor on their lower back. They\u2019re expected to wear the sensors all day, every day, for five weeklong periods before, during, and after physical therapy treatment, even during activities like sleeping and showering. The sensor has an accelerometer and a gyroscope to capture metrics like the angular velocity of the body. The participants, all age 50 and older and diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis, take part in 18 physical therapy sessions over 12 weeks, with a combination of in-person visits at the BU Physical Therapy Center<\/a> and virtual sessions.<\/p>\n

Kumar says there are many benefits to having a device that measures patients\u2019 improvement outside of a lab setting. \u201cIn the lab, we have our patients do certain activities\u2014walking, getting up from a chair\u2014and that might not reflect how they do those activities in their daily life because it\u2019s an artificial environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kumar, who expects to conclude the study by early 2022, will compare the sensor data to information recorded by 3D optical motion capture\u2014a sophisticated, lab-based system of cameras and sensors used to track movement in detail\u2014to check its accuracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main goal of this study is to validate the small single sensor against this 3D motion capture, and then use the validated metrics to see if we can detect improvement after physical therapy,\u201d Kumar says. He hopes that these smaller sensors can then be used in future large-scale studies to measure outcomes of physical therapy on osteoarthritis, with the goal of refining treatment.<\/p>\n

Read more stories from Inside Sargent<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deepak Kumar hopes that wearable sensors can measure knee osteoarthritis patients\u2019 improvements remotely. There isn\u2019t a cure for knee osteoarthritis, the debilitating condition where the joint\u2019s cushioning cartilage wears down. The treatment that has proven most effective for the disease, which causes painful friction between the bones and afflicts almost 14 million people in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10779,"featured_media":68523,"parent":67831,"menu_order":19,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10779"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68109"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69429,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/68109\/revisions\/69429"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/67831"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sargent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}