Work

Practicality of Using Pressure Sensors and Accelerometers to Quantify Hand Orthosis Compliance at Home

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Orthosis compliance monitoring provides insights into effective orthosis design and user wear time. Frequently, patient reports of orthosis use are subjective and often result in overestimation of compliance. Therefore, a tool to objectively observe whether patients wear their orthoses as instructed is vital. This study assessed the real-world practicality of using an objective compliance monitoring device with a hand orthosis. A device consisting of a pressure sensor and accelerometer was tested by ten healthy volunteers who wore a hand orthosis daily and completed a diary of their wear time and activities for a week. Sensor data obtained from the compliance monitoring device were analysed to discern each user's orthosis wear time. Differences between estimated wear time and actual wear time were insignificant. Pressure-based wear time estimations had a specificity of 99.3 ± 0.7% and a sensitivity of 80.3 ± 19.2%, whilst acceleration-derived estimations had a specificity of 94.5 ± 6.4% and a sensitivity of 73.2 ± 15.8%. This study demonstrated that orthosis compliance can be monitored outside the laboratory, and, furthermore, this device offers insights into the intensity and frequency of a user's activities and has the future potential to monitor orthosis fit and forces applied to affected joints using pressure.

Source: Bioengineering

DOI: 10.3390/bioengineering13060697

Authors: Devi Baruni Devanand, Matthew D. Gardiner, Angela E. Kedgley

Institutions: Imperial College London, Wexham Park Hospital, Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust, University of Oxford, Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology

Language: English

Topic: Context-Aware Activity Recognition Systems

Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,258