Force Sensors for Manual Therapists
Clinicians
The LiteTouch system is designed for chiropractors, physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, and osteopaths to provide quantitative insight into your patients' health by measuring the forces that you directly apply during diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation and tracking the results over time. It is becoming a tool for all musculoskeletal clinicians to standardize procedures profession-wide and to effectively communicate quantitative results among peers.
When to use LiteTouch
Many of the procedures musculoskeletal clinicians perform involve applying controlled pressure to the patient for therapy or to collect information. If you are a chiropractor, physical therapist, orthopedic surgeon, or osteopath, we recommend you use LiteTouch as a standard tool in your office for daily procedures. The system can be used in two ways. First, the force sensor can provide real-time
feedback to you about exactly how much force you are applying (from below 0.01 lb to 30 lb). With this information, you can determine the force required to elicit a pain response at very precise locations, measure muscle strength, muscle and joint stiffness, and many others. Second, the quantitative feedback can help you apply an exact force to your patient for any pre-determined duration. With this tool, you can evaluate joint laxity, range of motion, and muscle fatigue and also provide standardized, controlled therapy consistently over time. LiteTouch is also the perfect tool for training new clinicians or new procedures and can be used by large institutions and private practices for teaching.
How to use LiteTouch
activated to communicate with the display unit. The display unit is a touchscreen all-in-one computer
which can be mounted on the wall or stand on your countertop. It graphically displays the forces you are applying in real time, allowing you to set limits, alarms, zoom, record and replay measurement sessions. The real-time force is simultaneously displayed on the wrist cuff for convenient viewing in any position. Session information can be programmed and tracked for each of your patients and summary data is automatically generated for each session and across the patient's entire history.
When you start a new session with a patient, you'll first don a disposable force sensor and connect itwith the magnetic plug to the wrist cuff. This will take about as long as it would to put on a pair of gloves. The program will sense that you are ready for measurement and will automatically start up. It will first prompt you to choose which patient you have and the type of session plan you plan on following (session plans can be pre-recorded). You'll then be prompted to calibrate the sensor to your hand and the specific location you placed it on your hand. This is performed by pressing down on the desktop calibration plate up to whatever force you decide. Because you'll just be pressing buttons on the touch screen, all of this will take no more than 30 seconds. Then you're ready to measure.
There are many measurement profiles you can choose from including maximum force, duration above a threshold, press and hold, time up and down ramps, and cyclic loading, among others. The profile
you choose will run for a designated amount of time, or you can stop and start at any time with the touch buttons on the wrist cuff. In fact, from this point on, you don't need to use the computer at all; all of the control necessary to finish the session can be done from the cuff. As you perform each examination, test, manipulation, or adjustment, the system records the data and stores it for later review. Smart algorithms calculate only the results you care about for every measurement. When you're done with your session, pull the magnetic plug out of the connector, peel it off your hand and dispose of it.
When you're ready to review your data, you'll find a report already generated for each session which includes the summary data for each measurement. You can back up to look at the patient's entire history as well, enabling you to track progress over weeks and even years. All of the data is securely stored on your hard drive and is never shared online.