Wearables devices have recently grown to become virtual assistants for health-conscious individuals. The rise of these devices has impacted the health industry, advancing the technological capability of conducting observations and diagnoses. This has allowed medical product providers to directly monitor progress, expanding and personalizing their reach to consumers.
Besides the health industry, the sports industry has also been experiencing a recent spike in technological integration. The need for technological tools to monitor athlete training has shown a significant increase in demand. With the sports industry consistently undergoing intensive commercialization, there is a need to keep better track of the overall fitness of athletes.
However, injuries are all too common in high-intensity interval training environments. This is why engineers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison) recently designed a wearable that can directly identify muscle strain to help mitigate recurring injuries.
Muscles generate movement by pulling on tendons, allowing the joints to move and perform a physical activity. However, assessing the force that such activities exert on the tendons can be difficult. In fact, you’d have had to look inside the human body itself to get a good idea.
This particular wearable was designed to noninvasively measure tendon tension while an athlete is performing a physical activity. This can range from the most mundane activity such as walking and running, or more specialized physical exercises like endurance training and strength exercises.
The device, which is mounted on the skin above the tendon, measures the force exerted by the muscles. It tracks the vibrational characteristics of the tendon as it undergoes force and tension. “Currently, wearables can measure our movement, but do not provide information on the muscle forces that generate the movement,” said Darryl Thelen, a mechanical engineering professor at UW-Madison.
This device measures force on the Achilles, the patellar and the hamstring tendons. The wearable can measure how the tendon reacts when users modify their individual movement—such as modifying step length or speed at different lengths of exertion.
Currently, physical therapy methods cannot accurately measure muscle strain during injury recovery. The rehabilitation process for tendon injuries is based primarily on prescriptive timelines instead of the monitoring of muscles and tendons in real time. This particular design is set to undergo clinical applications. The ability to measure tendon activity in real time could push physiotherapists to further understand the mechanics of human movement and motor control.
“We think the potential of this new technology is high, both from a basic science standpoint and for clinical applications,” said Thelen. “For example, tendon force measures could be used to guide treatments of individuals with gait disorders. It may also be useful to objectively assess when a repaired tendon is sufficiently healed to function normally and allow a person to return to activity.”
The engineers and researchers at UW-Madison published their design and approach on April 23, in the journal Nature Communications. The technology used in the wearable is currently being patented through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.
For more on innovative health-tracking wearables, check out this article on Wearable Sweat Sensors for Health Monitoring.