Design and Implementation of Intelligent Crutches for Medical Applications

Intelligent crutches will be a breakthrough in the medical field for the patients undergoing therapy due to various ailments and accidents. In this paper we present a forearm crutch with sensor technology to monitor the proper usage of the crutch by these patients. The correct usage of the crutch will improve the recovery rate of the patients. So it is very necessary to monitor the usage of the crutch during the rehabilitation period. In this design only two external sensors are incorporated to avoid the complexity of using many sensors or optical motion capturing system or cameras etc. A force sensitive resistor (FSR) is used to measure the amount of force applied to the crutch and an accelerometer is used for determining the speed of movement of the patient. Based on the medical experts report the percentage of weight that a person can apply to the crutch is predetermined and is used as the reference value. The controller can check whether the applied weight is greater than the reference value and can take decision to warn the patient about the misuse of the crutch via speakers.