Project Description: 

Sponsored by the National Security Innovation Network, Action Action has created a remote-use muscle strength assessment device, Power Up!. Currently to assess strength, patients must take many trips to the clinician. Commonly used methods require a child push against a clinician, leading to variation dependent on the clinician’s strength and the patient’s willingness to exert force. Top pediatric rheumatologist Dr. Olcay Jones and researcher Dr. Nathan Lazarus from the Army Research lab challenged our group to create a reliable, objective way to measure muscle strength. Unlike previous methods, Power Up! allows for objective, repeatable data to be collected. Power Up! uses sensor technology to curb this resulting subjectivity in measurement to a range of 5% of true strength, every time. Power Up! allows patients to record data from the comfort of their homes and clinicians to have access to patient’s progress at their fingertips. Power Up! consists of a smart rod mounted between a hand grip and shoulder pad that stay fixed with simple straps for a quick setup. While in use, the device tracks patient progress with a load sensor cleverly embedded into the system. A child will be motivated to exert maximal force when prompted by the gamification incorporated into the device. The data obtained from the system is easily viewed on an LCD screen, which displays the maximal force the patient exerted while using the device. Parents and clinicians can see results immediately in the companion application, which allows progress tracking. Parents will also be able to add notes about the child’s physical and mental state at the time of administration, to account for any anomalies in the data. We hope that with the help of Power Up!, Actin Action can help get little ones back into action!