Using Activities of Daily Living to Evaluate the Design and Placement of a Proximal Radius Fracture Fixation Device

The return of a patient to activities of daily living following a surgical intervention (i.e. joint replacement, rigid fixation, etc.) involving an implantable device is often used as one component to measure the success of the surgery [1]. The longevity of the implant subject to the forces imposed when performing those normal daily activities is another. As people are living longer and continuing to maintain active lifestyles, the paradigm of everyday activities that are used to evaluate implant longevity must also evolve. Although physiological boundary conditions during pre-clinical implant evaluations have been used for simulating the life span of a new device, only a small number of everyday activities used for deriving those forces have been widely characterized. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how musculoskeletal simulation can be used for providing the boundary conditions of a finite element model used to evaluate the design space of an implant subject to specific activities of daily living (Figure 1).