Verification of the rehabilitation effect for wrist contracture by dynamic analysis of carpals

Abstract

Distal radius bone fracture is major disease for elderly people. As its cure needs fixing the wrist for long time, the wrist often stiffens up and the range of its motion tends to be restricted, which is generally called “contracture”. As the contracture interferes with their daily life, the speedy improvement of the contracture are strongly required. Thus, the rehabilitation of the wrist joint is necessary. Recently, the traction of the maniphalanx during flexing and extending the wrist joint is considered to be efficient as the rehabilitation procedure. However, the recovering mechanism by the traction is not clear. The investigation of its mechanism will improve the rehabilitation procedure and be available for development of rehabilitation equipment. However adjusting the magnitude and direction of the traction force to the maniphalanx applied manually during such rehabilitation procedure is almost impossible. Thus, we developed a rehabilitation equipment for the investigation. The equipment mainly consists of a wrist traction device and a round-rail base. The wrist traction device can pull maniphalanx toward finger direction by constant weights, and slide roundly. Thus, the equipment can applied the constant traction force to the wrist during flexing and extending the wrist joint. By the equipment, the dynamic motion of carpals in the wrist is observed by X-ray photography. As a result, it is found that the displacement range of radius - lunate joint (R-L joint) is extended by the traction. Namely, if R-L joint suffers contracture highly, the discussed rehabilitation procedure well moves R-L joint and can improve its movability.