A Clinical 3D Movement Analysis System for Assessing Lower Extremity Injury Risk and Recovery in Athletes

DESCRIPTION provided by applicant The mission of Bioniks is to develop and commercialize accurate low cost movement analysis systems for clinicians ergonomists athletic trainers and other professionals interested in quantifying human movement Our initial focus is on developing computer enhancements for inexpensive D cameras like the Microsoft Kinect These enhancements surpass the accuracy limitations of state of the art andquot skeletonandquot by combining established marker based measurement protocols and advanced computer vision techniques to generate clinical quality D human motion data Difficult to obtain outside a laboratory setting these kinematic data are inherently valuable for several NIH priority areas
assessment of function and fatigability in older adults NIA measurement of gait and posture biomechanics to monitor patients NIAMS tools to enable mobile health and telemedicine by providing a means to monitor evaluate manage track train and treat patients in underserved community settings and rural and remote locations NIMHD NINR tools for health informatics for clinical and translational research NCATS and measurement of occupational health stressors in the workplace NIOSH For this Phase I STTR Bioniksandapos goal is to provide therapists with an affordable and easy to use D movement analysis system that quantifies an athleteandapos s risk for or recovery from lower extremity injury Our first aim is to show that the movement analysis system will not only be accurate and reliable Aim but also be practical and easy to use Aim We hypothesize that our kinematic measurements will agree with those from a gold standard laboratory based motion capture system Vicon and that therapists will judge our system to be more useful and usable than current clinical tools including traditional D video analyses To test these hypotheses we will conduct a validation study with healthy volunteers at the UCSF Human Performance Center as well as a pilot usability study with therapists and healthy volunteers and patients with history of ACL injury at the SF Sports and Spine Physical Therapy Clinic

PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE Because of the high cost and perceived ineffectiveness of traditional musculoskeletal care there is growing pressure on health care professionals to provide more cost effective treatments as well as to validate treatment effectiveness Bioniks has the opportunity to be the first clinic based tool that quantitatively and objectively assesses musculoskeletal function of patients over the course of treatment and rehabilitation This STTR proposal focuses on quantification of an athleteandapos s risk for and recovery from lower extremity injury