Sensor Design for Ankle Resiliency Training
Ashwin Iyer1,2, Amy Silder3, Hunter Lassard1,2
1Altec Inc, Natick, MA 01760, United States.
Military Medicine
|August 6, 2026
Summary
The Ankle REsiliency System (ARES) accurately measures peroneus longus (PL) muscle workload during exercises, improving rehabilitation for lateral ankle sprains. This system overcomes surface EMG limitations, aiding injury prevention and recovery.
Area of Science:
- Biomechanics
- Biomedical Engineering
- Sports Medicine
Background:
- Lateral ankle sprains (LASs) are common, leading to significant duty limitations in service members.
- Current rehabilitation focuses on peroneus longus (PL) strengthening, but assessments are subjective.
- Existing surface EMG (sEMG) methods struggle with crosstalk in small muscles like the PL.
Purpose of the Study:
- Introduce the Ankle REsiliency System (ARES), a novel platform for quantifying PL workload.
- Develop and validate a system to overcome sEMG crosstalk limitations.
- Provide an objective tool for assessing PL engagement in rehabilitation and injury prevention.
Main Methods:
- Developed ARES integrating high-density sEMG with custom signal processing.
- Validated the system with 5 healthy male participants (21-35 years).
- Compared ARES workload estimates against bipolar sEMG during isolated and dynamic exercises.
Main Results:
- ARES achieved 93.3% accuracy in isolating PL activity from crosstalk.
- The system demonstrated significant detection of workload increases during dynamic exercises (P < .05).
Conclusions:
- ARES effectively integrates hardware and algorithms to assess PL workload.
- The system robustly differentiates PL activity from crosstalk, showing potential for injury prevention and rehabilitation.
- ARES offers an objective measure to guide training and recovery protocols for LASs.
