Using Sensorized Gloves and Dimensional Reduction for Hand Function Assessment of Patients with Osteoarthritis

Abstract

Sensorized gloves allow the measurement of all hand kinematics that are essential for daily functionality. However, they are scarcely used by clinicians, mainly because of the difficulty of analyzing all joint angles simultaneously. This study aims to render this analysis easier in order to enable the applicability of the early detection of hand osteoarthritis (HOA) and the identification of indicators of dysfunction. Dimensional reduction was used to compare kinematics (16 angles) of HOA patients and healthy subjects while performing the tasks of the Sollerman hand function test (SHFT). Five synergies were identified by using principal component (PC) analyses, patients using less fingers arch, higher palm arching, and a more independent thumb abduction. The healthy PCs, explaining 70% of patients’ data variance, were used to transform the set of angles of both samples into five reduced variables (RVs): fingers arch, hand closure, thumb-index pinch, forced thumb opposition, and palmar arching. Significant differences between samples were identified in the ranges of movement of most of the RVs and in the median values of hand closure and thumb opposition. A discriminant function for the detection of HOA, based in RVs, is provided, with a success rate of detection higher than that of the SHFT. The temporal profiles of the RVs in two tasks were also compared, showing their potentiality as dysfunction indicators. Finally, reducing the number of sensors to only one sensor per synergy was explored through a linear regression, resulting in a mean error of 7.0°.

Comparison and Improvement of CyberGlove III Calibration Methods

“…We did not investigate the wrist sensors and the palm arch has shown to be difficult to calibrate. Even though the findings in this work need to be confirmed for arthritis patients as well, it already shows that using the CyberGlove III for objective hand monitoring of healthy subjects is feasible, supporting previous findings ( [2], [6], [8], [11], [12], [22]). Furthermore, the CyberGlove III was already used to discriminate between healthy individual and patients suffering from osteoarthritis with an accuracy of 80 % [8].…”

“…It was shown that hands should be at least 184 mm long to record DIP joint angles properly [7]. The DIP joint angles are often either not analyzed or not even recorded by using the 18 sensor version of the CyberGlove, due to the difficulties to obtain high quality and reliable measurements [8]- [10].…”

“…Such gloves are not yet used to assess hand function in clinical routine or clinical trials with larger cohorts. However, there are several studies using these gloves for different use cases, for example, to measure joint angles in sign language [6], to detect osteoarthritis from functional tasks [8]- [10] or to measure joint movement during general functional tasks [11]- [14]. We see a potential benefit in the implementation of sensor gloves in the assessment of hand function in inflammatory joint diseases, such as rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis, that are characterized by swelling and pain of the hand and finger joints [15].…”

Using active or functional range of motion as a further indicator to detect hand osteoarthritis. A preliminary study

“…The data employed in this work correspond to experiments from two previous studies [11,24]. The AROM and FROM data, aggregated in [11], are herein provided per subject in the appendices (see Tables A1 to A4).…”

“…The present study aims to examine the idea of using ROM as an early indicator of the presence of HOA by performing a linear discriminant analysis with the ROM of those joints that significantly differed to look for a discriminant function capable of detecting HOA in different stages. We successfully tested a linear discriminant analysis to detect HOA in a previous study [24], but we used the kinematic reduced variables obtained from a principal component analysis of hand kinematics while performing the Sollerman hand function test (SHFT) tasks. Although the results were good, the complexity of the technique may hinder its use in clinics.…”