Wearable Device Based on a Flexible Conductive Textile for Knee Joint Movements Monitoring

Wearable devices for physiological parameters monitoring are gaining broad acceptance due to their ease of use, comfortability, and reliability. Among all human joints, the knee joint is the most involved in day-to-day activities. Monitoring the knee joint movements may allow outlining an optimized and patient-specific rehabilitation process and may perform a quantitative assessment of the improvements made. In this work, we propose a washable and reusable wearable system based on a conductive textile for knee flexion-extension monitoring. We performed a biomechanical analysis to guide the design of the sensing element, to perform its metrological characterization, and to optimize its integration into a wearable knee guard. We tested the developed system on 5 healthy volunteers performing 3 different rehabilitation exercises in terms of number of flexion-extension performed and of the knee angle. This assessment was performed using a motion capture system as a reference. The results are promising and in good agreement with the reference system and enable the system to be suitable for its application in rehabilitation and day-to-day monitoring.