Towards a comprehensive digital wearable tracking system of the patient recovery journey after extremity trauma: a narrative review

Enabling our patients to recover back to their pre-injury state or beyond is at the core of every treatment in orthopedic trauma surgery. Current methods of assessing functional recovery after extremity trauma largely focus on individual segments of complex, compound activities, or are created for a specific purpose and for specific populations. Such assessment instruments cannot readily account for the effect of limitations in adjacent segments. Equally, the segment-specific instruments use limited domains to assess complex actions and aptitudes. Most traditional functional assessment tools do not accommodate the individual nature of function and only assess function in larger increments during follow-up clinic visits. Recent developments of both commercial and medical-grade wearable systems and associated digital technologies can overcome most of the challenges associated with traditional outcome measures. In this review, we introduce the main technologies and their potential to track patient functional recovery in relation to the treatment phase, both before and after an injury.