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Virginia Tech Uses Computerized Knee Brace for Rehab 78

Posted by Cliff from the can't-resist-articles-about-my-alma-mater dept.
jimCATDOG writes: "College running back Lee Suggs was injured in VT's first football game, requiring knee surgery and the rest of the season off. VT cares about having the Big East's most prolific scorer healthy. The cool part is that they are using a computerized knee brace to help bring him back to full speed." As the tools available to medical rehabilition improve, what other advances can we expect in the near future?
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Virginia Tech Uses Computerized Knee Brace for Rehab More

Virginia Tech Uses Computerized Knee Brace for Rehab

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  • someone is going to it, so i will get it out of the way. will it make me "better, stronger, faster?" does it cost $6,000,000? when i jump will it go neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh neh? can i work for oscar goldman when it's all over? thanks, good night everyone.
  • Don't be in a hurry, this will take time. How long depends on what kind of surgery you need. Orthoscopic is the least damaging, but any surgery pretty much knocks out your quads and weakens your calf for many weeks. Age and physical condition going into surgery should make a difference. I was 38 when I had mine, and had been riding only about 80 miles/week prior to the injury (I was a grad student, not racing, but riding for fitness). In my twenties I was a cat 2, training about 300 miles per week. So although I didn't return to racing following surgery, my experience may at least give you some idea what you're in for.

    After a crash on campus (slipped on an oil patch), I had orthroscopic surgery on my right knee for what the surgeon thought was a torn ACL.. Turned out the ACL was intact, but there was meniscus damage and "a lot of junk and blood in there" that needed to be cleaned up, said the surgeon. I was on crutches for about a week. I used a knee brace for about 9 weeks, during which I was doing physical therapy that included electro-stimulus, stretching, weights, stationary bike, and work with a computerized resistance machine. I was using a turbo trainer 3x a week after two weeks, and was doing short road rides after about a month. Still, even with continued physical therapy and riding, it was a good 3 months before my knee was feeling stable enough, and my quads strong enough, for extended out of the saddle efforts. (I should mention I was off the bike between week 10 and 13 while doing field work in Panama, during which I was hiking up and down hills in the rainforest, so I was still getting a work out.) After 6 months, my leg felt about 85% recovered. 90% after 8 mos. 100% at 12 mos.

    If you're younger and have been training, you'll probably recover faster. But my guess is it will still take months to get back to pre-surgery form.
    • Turned out the ACL was intact, but there was meniscus damage and "a lot of junk and blood in there" that needed to be cleaned up, said the surgeon. I was on crutches for about a week.



      Why would blood ever get in your access control lists?

      TimC.

    • This sounds so similar to my experience, except I wasn't in as good of shape going into my surgery.

    • had been riding only about 80 miles/week prior to the injury (I was a grad student, not racing, but riding for fitness).

      I have a question about something related to biking that I've never understood. What, for god's sake, is up with those biking outfits? Do those people who wear more ads than a Nascar driver really think it makes them look cool? Biking has by FAR the most ridiculous looking gear of any sport. Even golf plus-fours look better than bright yellow ass-huggers with some French company plastered on the butt.

      I'll bet the bike clothing industry chortles at every industry report about how much they make in advertising revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if they spent massive dollars to somehow convince people that wearing advertising is somehow hip.

      I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this. If you can shed any light on the subject, please give us the straight scoop.

  • I found a link [orthopedictechreview.com] to another description of the brace here. It seems like a pretty cool little toy for doing this sort of rehab. I'd much rather have this than a woman yelling at my face that I can lift my leg, I just have to try harder.
  • Hell, I remember 6 weeks of being told by a pencil-necked geek that I wasn't trying hard enough when I wasn't strong enough to pick up a tennis ball after a shoulder scope. This would be much more pleasant. You could heap your psychological trauma and pent up hate on a machine. That makes it all better.


    Anyhoo, VPI plays in a weak conference with only one decent team other than themselves so missing Mr. Suggs shouldn't be too bad. I say we line the Chokies up in Bristol agin them Vols and let them see what a real football team is like.

    • Yeah, it must really suck to lose to an unranked team. Maybe you should have waited to see what your "Real" team is capable of.

      Sorry to hear about your loss, but thanks for your spot in the AP poll.
  • My first impression from the Slash Lead in was that it was motorized, etc. but that is not quite right.

    It is not motorized as such. It does limit physical motion to prevent injury.

    Otherwise, it is basically a fancy peripheral to a monitor which collects appropriate bio data.

    Very useful for rehab, of course, but surprising that someone hadn't come up with something like this before? Or has this been around, and we just never noticed?

  • This is nice stuff, but I'm just waiting for that computerized brain stimulator...
  • Well, I guess I am the first Hokie here to write something. But hey, even if the story is about some Jock, I have to say Lee Suggs is still pretty cool, and I did graduate from VT.

    Back in the day when it was told that it couldn't be done, we did it and ended up at the Sugarbowl. Too bad the end results were not as well as we had hoped them to be.

    But we are still a contender no matter what conference we play as long as we play to the best of our ability and just keep on trucking down the road to BCS!!!

    I wonder if there will be any other hokies posting after I....

    GOOOO HOKIES!!!!!

  • Not just for Recovery.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Saturday October 06, 2001 @09:34AM (#2395226) Homepage Journal
    This would be a great motivator for workouts, and probably is if anyone is up on exercise trainers. In terms of feedback while working through a set pattern it reminds me of Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair, not much more sophisticated than that and motion sensors, if you think about it.

    As far as actual healing, football has done much for patients of knee problems, as teams and athletes alike are determined to keep valuable players in the game, where a torn ligament decades ago was a career ending injury.

    Currently I'm planning to have some knee work done, due to calcification of the anterior of the patella (I put my knee through ice at 11 and created microfractures which healed like sand paper, can hurt like the dickens) something like what Suggs is outfitted with might assist in my recovery program, but it still doesn't cause it to heal faster or tell where healing is at, that's still up to mother nature.

  • In the summer I tore my ACL playing football on turf. After surgery, I got the brace with the DonJoy Vista Rehab Management System. It comes with a little handheld computer that instructs your rehab activity. The brace really helped me out in recovering. My therapist would program specific actives, which she set goals for each, so I could do them when I wasn't at their complex. The brace measured the degree you would bend your leg, and you would have to reach a certain goal, in degrees, given by your therapist. The handheld computer records your information and then makes it so your therapist can read what you have accomplished; making it so you can't lie about doing exercises, and also helping the therapist know where you are in their program. The only thing I didn't like about the brace was I thought it was a bit bulky compared to the other braces I could have got, but I still thought it was worth it.
  • I hope they've got good security. I'd hate for Lee not to be able to bend his leg beacase his knee brace got hit with a DoS attack from a rival school...
  • Lee Suggs, huh? Sound worse than Dick Trickle to me...
  • I was never impressed by this kind of story. The costs involved are enough to keep these treatments out of the hands of the general populace and always have been--techniques such as rebuilding cartilage, specialized arthroscopy, and now computerized knee-braces are not for anyone but the ultra-rich and those who can afford to see private sports-medicine practitioners.

    It's like we're in the middle of one of the things Tyler Durden in Fight Club complained about: We've all been raised to believe we can be movie stars, or presidents, or super-rich businessmen, or wealthy enough to afford care like this.

    But we won't, and we can't.

    Makes me sick to read your crappy stories about how some super-overpaid jock gets the best care in the world, while the rest of us suffer our destroyed knees without that kind of medical attention. Jerks!
  • Now correct me if I'm wrong but... didn't Lee play in today's game where WV was thrashed? Now that must be one hell of a leg brace to allow him to play in a game this soon after surgery. WTF?? Do they have a Beowulf cluster of high-end PCs running nonstop regenerative tissue algorithms and mapping nerve ends? I tell you what they need to do- bring back the Power Glove for the NES ('member those??) for people who lost hands in thresher mishaps. Impress your friends and family as you pen the great American novel while at the same time fighting the nefarious forces of the Red Falcon!

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It was kinda like stuffing the wrong card in a computer, when you're stickin' those artificial stimulants in your arm. -- Dion, noted computer scientist

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