Technologies

Measuring muscle and ligament stress is crucial in rehabilitative medicine and medical research. Using this data, clinicians and researchers can develop treatment plans and new technologies to improve outcomes and speed recovery.

However, some techniques for gathering this data are highly invasive and involve threading a fiber optic sensor through the tissue or inserting a transducer in the tissue. Current noninvasive procedures are indirect and make assumptions about different tissues to estimate internal stress from external force. UW–Madison researchers have developed a new device and technique for dynamically, noninvasively and accurately measuring longitudinal stress in tendons, muscles and ligamentsin vivo.

The inventors use skin-mounted accelerometers to measure transverse wave speeds in superficial tissues under time-varying loading scenarios. Such wave speed propagation metrics are then used to determine tissue stress based on a wave propagation model.