| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 工業設計學系 === 105 === In aging society, chronic diseases and physical function decline ratio gradually increases. Researches has indicated that osteoarthritis is the most common among chronic diseases around the world. The painful and disabling symptoms of knee osteoarthritis brings mental, physical and economy burdens to patient and largely lowers quality of life. Osteoarthritis usually occurs in weight bearing joints, and mostly in medial knee joint since it bears most of the loading during gait. For early osteoarthritis, unloading and increase muscle strength through exercise is the most fundamental way. Also, use assisting devices while exercising can relief pain and increase willingness of patient or expand the duration. However, long-term use of assisting device may cause discomfort or even worse side effects. Hence, the purpose of this study includes (1) Develop an innovative assisting device that can reduce medial knee loading; (2) This device can relief knee pain caused by OA; (3) It will not restrict knee and peripheral muscle movement and thus increase comfort.
To design an innovative assisting device, this research obtains design criterions through reviewing existing products and expert focus group. According to these criterions, design concepts are generated in co-design activity and converged into one final design with morphological charts. Finally, prototype are built according to final design. As for evaluation experiment, it is divided into three parts according to research purposes. Objective evaluation uses image process to analyze gait data and calculates frontal plane lever arm magnitude as indirect assessment of medial to lateral knee loading. Medial knee loading variations then analyzed with paired samples t-test. As for subjective evaluation, visual analogue scale is used to present pain intensity before and after using the device. Pain intensity variation then analyzed with paired samples t-test. Last, VAS is also used in design criterion evaluation to present satisfaction scores.
The result of experiences shows this innovative assisting device can significantly reduce medial knee loading of both legs (p=0.003〈0.05, p=0.006〈0.05), the satisfaction score of design criterions are also acceptable. However, the result of pain relieving was not significant (p=0.383〉0.05) and long-term experiments are needed to further evaluate its efficacy on pain relieving and reducing side effects.
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