Towards Development of a Portable Apparatus for Knee Health Monitoring

The knee is the most commonly injured part of the human body. This paper aims to design a portable knee health apparatus by picking up muscle signals and angles. It consists of an EMG circuit to sense the muscle activity and an IMU sensor for measuring the angle. These two muscles are useful for movement of the leg. The quadricep of the leg is made up of four muscles one of the muscles is vastus medialis which is involved in the flexion extension activities along with tracking of patella, the calf muscle of the leg whose half compromises of the gastrocnemius is used for plantar flexing of knee and ankle joint. The dynamic movements such as running, jumping and other fast movements of the leg are dependent on the gastrocnemius muscle. This approach is applied to the different age groups of people especially on people above 60 years of age both males and females and adults above 20 both genders. By using the two parameters i.e. muscular strength and angle of the leg, we differentiated the knee with abnormalities and without abnormalities. The above two parameters were taken at four dynamic positions i.e. sitting-standing and flexion-extension. The results showed good potential for the non-invasive diagnosis of knee health.