SHoulder Assistance for Rehabilitating Patients
Every year, 7.4 million Americans suffer of shoulder related injuries, which leads them to visit a physical therapist to help them recuperate from their injury. Visiting a physical therapist is expensive and time-consuming for the patients involved. Most of the time, patients are given resistance bands to use for strengthening exercises in order to recover from their injury. However, resistance bands allow for too many degrees of motion, which could lead to further injury if the exercises are incorrectly performed.
Therefore, S.H.A.R.P (Shoulder Assistant for Rehabilitating Patient) was created to address these concerns, as well as to shorten recovery time by reducing the degrees of freedom, minimizing the costs of physical therapist visits, and allowing patients to perform the required exercises in the comfort of their home. To test S.H.A.R.P., the variance from intended plane of motion was measured in four patients using motion tracking analysis and compared to the variance when using resistance bands or no resistance. The resulting one tailed One-way ANOVA test showed p<0.0001 for all four patients, concluding that S.H.A.R.P. does decrease the variance from the intended plane of motion.
Therefore, S.H.A.R.P (Shoulder Assistant for Rehabilitating Patient) was created to address these concerns, as well as to shorten recovery time by reducing the degrees of freedom, minimizing the costs of physical therapist visits, and allowing patients to perform the required exercises in the comfort of their home. To test S.H.A.R.P., the variance from intended plane of motion was measured in four patients using motion tracking analysis and compared to the variance when using resistance bands or no resistance. The resulting one tailed One-way ANOVA test showed p<0.0001 for all four patients, concluding that S.H.A.R.P. does decrease the variance from the intended plane of motion.