A Peripheral Tactile Feedback System for Lateral Epicondilytus Rehabilitation Exercise

Lateral epicondilytus (LE), or tennis elbow, is a highly prevalent musculoskeletal condition that affects millions of people. Physiotherapy is a common treatment, with a large portion consisting of prescribed home-based exercises. Adherence to these programs is an important factor in rehabilitation, however there are many barriers to adherence including the exercise taking up too much of the patient’s attention, or the patient feeling like they are not carrying out exercises correctly. To address these problems, this paper describes a prototype system that uses haptic feedback to guide the patient to correctly carry out a commonly prescribed LE rehabilitation exercise, while allowing them to attend to external information such as another person or a screen. The system peripherally conveys information about the speed of movement and position of the user’s wrist movement via peripheral vibration feedback, allowing the user to make adjustments to movement whilst keeping the visual and auditory senses free to attend to other sources. Finally, we discuss future areas of research for this prototype and applications of vibrotactile feedback for physiotherapy in general.