Development of a Wearable Live-feedback System to Support Partial Weight-bearing While Recovering From Lower Extremity Injuries

Lower-body physical rehabilitation therapies and technologies are inevitably linked to the sports world. Partial weight-bearing is a common measure that accelerates the healing process following lower-body surgeries or fractures. In order to improve the compliance with this method, a smartphone application was developed. It provides the user with an audible and haptic biofeedback alarm when a predefined threshold is reached by the pressure sensors' data of a pair of instrumented insoles. The preliminary results show that the alarm functionality works in accordance with the stipulations. The biofeedback also appears to have a positive effect on the amount of steps under the target weight.