Physical Therapy Exercises

After coming back from the WISH workshop, we’ve really started to talk about the design and circuitry needed for building the prototype. Miranda is involved more with the fabrics and design of the device. On the other hand, I’m going to start with the circuitry and such with Arduino.

Before that, however, we realized that we needed to research exactly what exercise our device is aimed at. Though the exercise is relatively simple, we needed the formal name and description of it. We plan on meeting with a physical therapist soon to talk about the use of our device and we want to be able to communicate with her on what our device should do.

The name of the movement that our device aims at helping is called Elbow Flexion. Elbow flexion is the bending of one’s elbow which is normally about 142 degrees with a standard deviation of 10. Elbow extension is the straightening of one’s elbow. As patients gain more mobility, they may also want to gain strength by adding weights and such to their hands.

Elbow Anatomy

Along with researching the different exercises that patients can do, I’ve also played some more with the Ardunio software. The website is very helpful in explaining all the functions that the board can do and what the code is. So far, I’ve also been able to read from one of the analog input pins and print out the values. I’ve also tried setting one of the digital pins to high. Once I have the basics of Arduino down, the actual circuitry and such will be much simpler. There’s actually a lot that Arduino can do which is pretty cool and the program is really similar to C though I still have to research function names and how to setup the code and such.  We’re going to be diagramming and trying out the circuits with the flex sensor next.

-Alice