ProprioLogger: Evaluating Proprioception During Post-Surgical Rehabilitation using Portable IMUs

Proprioception is the sensation of body position and movement which is needed for balance and the performance of coordinated complex movements. Pain or injury to the shoulder can result in decreased proprioception and individuals with proprioceptive deficits are at increased risk for injury. However, it is possible to retrain an individual with impaired proprioception through exercise-based interventions. These interventions largely focus on improving joint position sense which can be measured by an individual's ability to reproduce joint angles. Existing methods of quantifying proprioception are cumber-some and/or expensive. We propose ProprioLogger: an easy to use, inexpensive, and real-time solution which uses an inertial measurement unit coupled with a partner Android application used to accurately measure an individual's joint position sense during a movement task. The accuracy of our system was evaluated using VICON's motion capture system as the ground-truth. A measurement difference of 4 degrees or less was found between ProprioLogger and VICON in many typical static use cases.