科学美国人60秒:Knee Sounds Give Docs a Leg Up

The sound of a cracking knee isn't particularly pleasant. But it gets worse when you listen up close. [knee-cracking recording] "It does for most people. But for me, it just makes me excited." Omer Inan, an electrical engineer at Georgia Tech. "I actually feel like there's some real information in them that can be exploited for the purposes of helping people with rehab."
膝盖破碎的声音并不悦耳。但是你靠近听，声音会更刺耳。“很多人都会有这种感觉，但是这种声音只会让我感到兴奋。” Omer Inan 是佐治亚理工学院的一名电气工程师。“我认为其实这些声音中包含一些可以帮助患者康复的信息。”

Inan's experience with cracking knees goes back to his days as an undergrad at Stanford, where he threw discus. "If I had a really hard workout, then the next day of course I'd be sore, but I'd also sometimes feel this catching or popping or creaking every now and then in my knee."
Inan的膝盖破碎的实验要追溯到他在斯坦福大学的学生时代，在那里他开始讨论这个实验。“如果训练十分困难，那么第二天我的膝盖就会非常痛，但是有时候我也会感觉到膝盖咯吱的声音。

A few years later, he found himself building tiny microphones at a high-end audio company. So when he got to Georgia Tech and heard the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, wanted better tech for knee injuries, he thought: Why not strap tiny microphones to people's knees, to eavesdrop as their legs bend? "What we think it is, is the cartilage and bone rubbing against each other, the surfaces inside the knee rubbing against each other, during the movements."
几年后，他在一家高端音频公司制作了微型麦克风。所以，当Inan来到佐治亚理工学院知道美国国防部先进教育局时，他希望能有更先进的技术来治疗膝盖伤。他想，“为什么不把微型麦克风嵌入人体的膝盖来记录膝盖弯曲的声音。”我们认为发出的软骨和肋骨相互摩擦，在膝盖运动的过程中，两者内侧相互摩擦而出声。

He and a team of physiologists and engineers built a prototype with stretchy athletic tape and a few tiny mics and skin sensors. And preliminary tests on athletes suggest the squishy sounds the device picks up are more erratic, and more irregular, in an injured knee than in a healthy one. Which Inan says might allow patients and doctors to track healing after surgery. Details appear in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
Inan 和一组生物学家以及工程师建立了一个原型，其中包括弹性透气胶带、数个小的麦克风还有皮肤传感器。最初对运动员的测试表明，与健康的膝盖相比，设备窃听到的是受伤的膝盖中柔软的声音非常的不稳定，也更无规律可循。该研究结果发表在《IEEE生物医学工程》杂志上。

"The primary application we're targeting at first is to give people a decision aid during rehabilitation, following an acute knee injury, to help them understand when they can perform particular activities, and when they can move to different intensities of particular activities." A useful thing to take a crack at.
“我们首次程序目标的目的是，膝盖受到严重创伤之后，首先要让患者知道，在康复期间自己可以进行何种特殊活动以及何时可以加强活动的强度。“新的尝试，非常有用哦!