A Cost-Effective Solution for Non-Invasive Home-Based Bone Fracture Healing Monitoring-Preliminary Prototype Tests

This paper presents a proposal for a method to continuously and non-invasively monitor bone fracture healing process. The monitoring could be conducted at homes of the patients without X-ray photography at hospitals which is currently the normal procedure. The proposed method is based on flex (bend) sensors attached to the patient’s skin under the cast at the location of the fracture. The sensors measure the possible change in angle due to an abnormal healing process. A commercial bend sensor is selected to initially investigate the suitability of the method. A testbed was developed to define the accuracy of the method. The results show that the selected method is a strong candidate for further and larger measurements.