Knee Pain Patient Simulation for Recommendation of Sit-to-Stand Handrail Positions

摘要

Estimating the physical burdens of people with motor dysfunction is helpful for developing care equipment and facilities. We propose a patient simulation where a trained healthy subject simulates impaired movement with instruments to guide his/her body motion with less possible incurred pain. Electric cutaneous stimuli are used to intuitively indicate possible pain of an injured body part. We used this simulator to investigate a suitable handrail position for knee pain holders during sit-down and stand-up motions. Electric stimuli were presented in proportion to the moment at the supposedly impaired knee. The results suggest that a handrail on either the healthy or impaired side significantly reduces the experienced physical burden (i.e., internal knee flexion-extension moment). Specifically, the maximum knee moment was smaller when the handrail was on the impaired side than it was on the healthy side.