Practicality of using pressure sensors and accelerometers to quantify hand orthosis compliance at home
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Devanand, Devi
Gardiner, Matthew
Kedgley, Angela
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Orthosis compliance monitoring provides insights into effective orthosis design and user wear time. Frequently, patient reports of orthosis use are subjective and often result in overestimation of compliance. Therefore, a tool to objectively observe whether patients wear their orthoses as instructed is vital. This study assessed the real-world practicality of using an objective compliance monitoring device with a hand orthosis. A device consisting of a pressure sensor and accelerometer was tested by ten healthy volunteers who wore a hand orthosis daily and completed a diary of their wear time and activities for a week. Sensor data obtained from the compliance monitoring device were analysed to discern each user’s orthosis wear time. Differences between estimated wear time and actual wear time were insignificant. Pressure-based wear time estimations had a specificity of 99.3 ± 0.7% and sensitivity of 80.3 ± 19.2%, whilst acceleration-derived estimations had a specificity of 94.5 ± 6.4% and sensitivity of 73.2 ± 15.8%. This study demonstrated that orthosis compliance can be monitored outside the laboratory and, furthermore, this device offers insights into the intensity and frequency of a user’s activities and has the future potential to monitor orthosis fit and forces applied to affected joints using pressure.
Date Issued
2026-06-01
Date Acceptance
2026-06-15
Citation
Bioengineering, 2026, 13 (6)
ISSN
2306-5354
Publisher
MDPI AG
Journal / Book Title
Bioengineering
Volume
13
Issue
6
Copyright Statement
© 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
License URL
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
697
Date Publish Online
2026-06-18