Developing a toolbox for pre- and post-operative assessment of wrist function

About the Project

The human wrist is a highly complex anatomical joint. Its healthy functioning is crucial to normal hand performance, and our ability to successfully interact with and manipulate the environment. Humans exhibit substantial heterogeneity in musculoskeletal anatomy and in the functional demands placed on the wrist during daily life. This variability is further shaped by ageing and sex, and is expressed in disparate age-related clinical patterns: ageing females experience higher rates of hand related musculoskeletal dysfunction, whereas ageing males are more prone to wrist dysfunction. Despite these known differences, it remains unclear whether individuals with distinct anatomies or functional demands would benefit from different surgical interventions. This uncertainty largely reflects a lack of high-quality datasets describing wrist movements during activities of daily living and how these movements vary with anatomy, age, sex, and habitual hand use. As a direct result, we currently lack the basic understanding of wrist function needed to optimise the choice surgical approach for a patient with specific anatomical features or everyday functional demands. Similar limitations exist after surgery, where clinicians lack objective tools to quantify the extent to which patients regain functional wrist motion.

Working alongside basic biologists, engineers and research-active clinicians (and an industry partner), the student will address these gaps through a programme of experimental biomedical engineering research. The overarching aim of the project is two-fold: first, to generate a fundamental scientific understanding of coupled wrist movements in healthy human subjects; and second, to use this high-resolution laboratory data set as a benchmark to develop and validate a new multi-sensor inertial measurement system that can be deployed in a clinical setting. These overarching aims will be addressed through the following objectives:

OBJECTIVE 1: Characterise the key anatomical (e.g. muscle and ligament proportions) and biomechanical variability (e.g. joint motions, muscle activations) during activities of daily living across a diverse healthy population, establishing the first normative dataset for wrist form-function.

OBJECTIVE 2: Use biomechanical computer modelling and cadaveric simulation to determine how different surgical choices (e.g. different partial wrist fusions at varying anatomical levels) may impact individuals with different anatomies and/or habitual functional demands differentially.

OBJECTIVE 3: Develop and validate a new, multi-sensor inertial measurement system against the OBJ1-2 data sets, across standardised planar wrist movements (e.g. flexion-extension) and more complex 3D movement (e.g. dart throwers motion, circumduction) typically used in everyday life.

By addressing a key scientific knowledge gap directly, this project will advance our fundamental understanding of the principles and mechanisms that govern wrist and hand function throughout the adult life course. Through direct collaboration with end-users in the form of industry and clinicians, we will harness new understanding of wrist-hand function to realise societal benefit in the form of advanced healthcare technologies and promoting health in later life, realising long-term economic and societal benefit in much-needed areas.