Investigation of IoT on ankle-foot orthosis by introducing an existing life-activity measurement system

There is a strong demand from stakeholders in clinical practice to determine the usage status of orthotics among patients discharged after treatment. Considering that such patients will be using the orthoses at home or workplace, we proposed to integrate an activity meter that is already commercially available as a medical device into an existing orthosis to convert it to an IoT -enabled orthosis. The scope includes developing a method to attach the activity meter to the ankle-foot orthosis using a jig devised by us, and an algorithm to determine the operation status of the orthosis using the data obtained from the activity meter by application of IoT. To confirm the effectiveness of the IoT -enabled ankle-foot orthosis in meeting the requirements, we conducted several short-term and long-term experiments to judge the status of the subject while putting-on/removal of the orthosis, during normal routine activities at home and workplace, and at rest. We evaluated the results of the experiments to verify the quality of the data, reliability of the IoT/cloud network, and the effectiveness of the algorithm to interpret the data to actionable information.