Grant Recipients
Oliver Schneider, Management Science and Engineering
Mark Hancock, Management Science and Engineering
Robert Burns, Kinesiology and Health Sciences
(Project timeline: November 2024 - October 2025)
Description
Hands-on training is essential for kinesiology and therapy related education. Some procedures, like the valgus stress test to assess injuries to the knee’s medial-collateral ligament (MCL), are difficult to teach: assessment involves movement/rotation of a knee to be able to feel different grades of injury and there are ethical and logistical implications in having novice students “practice” on injured people. Our team has developed a manikin of the leg with adjustable tension that can render injured and healthy knees. While we have evaluated the manikin with seven Registered Physiotherapists and Certified Athletic Therapists, the leg is still costly to manufacture, thus hard to deploy in class.
We propose to build a low-cost version of this manikin (using 3D printed), evaluate it internally with our team’s clinical instructor and externally with professional therapists, then deploy into kinesiology courses at the University of Waterloo to receive initial feedback from students.
Project Objectives
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Build a low-cost version of the haptic manikin with a VR experience for visual priming that can mimic the high-fidelity (expensive) manikin’s capabilities
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Evaluate the low-cost version of the haptic manikin with experienced practitioners to test if it can effectively render healthy and injured states sufficiently to deploy in a classroom
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Prepare and deploy both the high-fidelity and low-fidelity knees into KIN140L, 400 and 491