Considerations for development of sensing and monitoring tools to facilitate treatment and care of persons with lower-limb loss: A review

Sensing and monitoring technologies offer enormous potential to enhance the quality of healthcare provided to persons with lower-limb loss. Incorporation of these technologies into the rehabilitation process creates opportunities for a multidimensional exchange of timely, relevant, and meaningful health information between patients, their prostheses, and healthcare providers. Here, the authors envision a conceptual model for enhancing prosthetic rehabilitation through use of integrated physical and/or biological sensors and remote monitoring methods. Several specific applications that target treatment, diagnosis, and prognosis of health issues faced by persons with limb loss are proposed in an effort to demonstrate how collecting and using objective data can facilitate clinical decision making. Contemporary integrated sensors that may be used in these applications are reviewed and their limitations discussed. It is hoped that the considerations proposed here may serve to stimulate development of clinically useful monitoring and sensing technologies and promote their integration into routine amputation rehabilitation.