Sensor boot guides bone injury healing

ApplySci blogs about sensor based health innovations.  We have seen far too little in the orthopedics space, which remains an area of opportunity.  This week we discussed dorsaVi‘s spine injury assessment tool, and today we will describe the “SmartBoot“.

Developed by University of Delaware researchers, SmartBoot enables physicians to monitor orthopedic patients as they recover. Users are given visual feedback to let them know if they are under- or overloading a limb after injury.

According to Professor Jill Higginson, whose student, Brian Knarr, developed the boot:  “Patients are often trained in the clinic on a bathroom scale and then sent home with crutches, with the assumption that they can consistently perform partial weight bearing on their own.”  However, research has shown that patients often bear significantly more weight on the injured foot than prescribed, which delays healing.


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