Functional movement assessment by means of inertial sensor technology to discriminate between movement behaviour of healthy controls and persons with knee osteoarthritis.
Rob van der Straaten, Mariska Wesseling, Ilse Jonkers and 7 others
PMID 32430036WHAT IT FOUND
Inertial sensors distinguished knee osteoarthritis from healthy controls during walking, lunges, squats and stairs, but not sit-to-stand.
People with knee osteoarthritis showed less knee flexion and trunk and pelvis rotation, with limited links to pain or fear of movement.
Key findings
01Inertial sensor measurements separated people with knee osteoarthritis from healthy controls during walking, lunges, squats and stairs, but not during sit-to-stand.
02During walking, people with knee osteoarthritis had less trunk rotation, less internal pelvic rotation, and reduced knee flexion range of motion than healthy controls.
03Only two significant correlations with patient-reported outcomes were found: less knee flexion during late walking related to more pain, and less hip abduction during early sideward lunge related to more fear of movement; no significant correlation with disability was observed.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
The sample was small, with 12 healthy controls and 19 people with knee osteoarthritis. All people with knee osteoarthritis had severe unilateral disease and were waiting for knee replacement, so the results may not apply to milder knee osteoarthritis or disease in both knees. The knee osteoarthritis group was older than the healthy control group, and the paper says this age difference may have influenced the results. Both legs of healthy controls were analysed without distinguishing right from left, and the affected knee compartment was not separated in the analysis. Some movement trials were lost to technical errors or marker visibility problems, and the analysed trials corresponded with 75 percent of all recorded trials. Practice trials were not recorded and varied between participants, and all tasks were performed barefoot. Inertial sensors can be disturbed by ferromagnetic materials and require a static calibration with straight limbs, which may reduce accuracy in people with knee osteoarthritis.
Declared interests
The paper names Limburg Clinical Research Center as the funder and reports no other competing interests.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that inertial sensors can identify knee osteoarthritis during every functional task. The sit-to-stand task showed no discriminating differences, and the correlations with pain and disability were limited.