Human hands have lots of muscles powering the fingers and thumbs, and when those muscles are weakened by injury or disease, it can affect simple day-to-day tasks. But now, a peg board and a P-D-A could be the next device to give doctors the upper hand.
Dr. Gloria Gogola is pediatric hand surgeon, who needed a way to measure muscle strength in her patients, so she presented the problem to some mechanical engineering students. "She said, 'I'm currently using a test called the manual muscle test. It's very subjective and not very reliable test,'" says graduate student Matthew Miller.
So the students developed a device called prime - which stands for peg restrained intrinsic muscle evaluator. Using a peg board, a loop and a P-D-A, prime isolates individual muscles and measures their strength. "So we flip it on, the light turns on and what happens is there's a load sensor there and then basically how hard you pull on it, you send a signal out to this P-D-A," says graduate student Steve Xu.
he says the P-D-A allows doctors to track the muscle's progress and make decisions about therapy, "A lot of things affect the hand. 20% of ER admissions are hand related, children. It's the most commonly injured part of the body and we spend two billion dollars a year on carpal tunnel."
6-year-old Alia suffers from a congenital muscle disorder. "We need to know either way if she's getting a little weaker on us or a little stronger. We need to know those very tiny changes. It's true in different conditions as well for example someone developing muscular dystrophy," says Dr. Gogola.
She says those tiny changes could be all Alia needs to maintain the strength to write her name, "In any condition where the amount of muscle strength is important to quantify, to measure accurately and reliably and in small increments, it'll make a big difference."
These students are working on a business plan to take the device to market, but Dr. Gogola is already using their proto-type in her practice.
