Project Introduction

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) affects over 600 million people worldwide and treatments range in invasiveness from requiring drugs to surgery. Pain caused by knee loading lowers the patient’s activity level and quality of life. Gait retraining is a noninvasive technique to mitigate pain and change injurious movement patterns and is capable of reducing knee loads. OpenSim models demonstrated that it was possible to develop a muscle re-coordination strategy that lowers gastrocnemius (gastroc) activation without changing gait kinematics. Currently, however, gait retraining efforts require a heavily instrumented lab, limiting not only the ability to conduct therapy at a large scale but also the activities under which and duration that a patient can retrain for. This study examines strategies to retrain gait outside the lab. We expect to develop a wearable capable of measuring kinematics and muscle activations, observe reduced gastroc activations of 20% after a one-hour retraining program, and verify that this leads to a reduction in knee loading. Furthermore, we hope to enumerate strategies to reduce gastroc activation and validate OpenCap as a gait kinematics monitoring tool. Our results motivate novel therapies for pain reduction in Knee OA patients. More broadly, they suggest that gait retraining is viable at a large scale. The development and validation of these tools enables and encourages studies of other gait retraining techniques like knee-adduction-moment (KAM) and tibia load reduction.