Every year, over two million people suffer acute ankle sprains. Another three-hundred thousand suffer ankle fractures.

Depending on the type of injury and the corresponding severity, recovery can range anywhere from two to almost twenty weeks. The vast majority of these sprains and fractures are the result of off axis loads and impact trauma at the ankle. If this sounds intimidating, imagine jumping for a basketball and landing on your ankle the wrong way – that’s not just painful, that’s dangerous.

A concerningly large quantity of these injuries are for the most part preventable – especially in terms of repeat injuries that occur as a result of improper recovery. In fact, in sixty-one percent of ankle sprain patients, the first is predictive of a series of recurrent ankle injuries. It is also the case that approximately 70% of these injuries are improperly rehabbed, with a considerable loss of strength and lateral stability at the joint.

In most patients, if not all, some form of bracing or physical therapy is recommended to ensure proper rehabilitation. However, the compliance rate for these therapies is one of the lowest among orthopedic injuries, with studies citing an instance rate of up to 80% rate of incompliance with the clinically recommended therapies.

There must be a better way. Well, now there is.

Welcome to StepWise: the first modular, adaptive ankle brace that supports patients through the complete rehabilitation of ankle sprains and fractures.

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*Note: StepWise is a Senior capstone project developed under the supervision of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The College of New Jersey. The project is being conducted within a design control framework: a comprehensive design standard featuring creation of device requirements, specifications, validation, verification, and prototyping based on industry procedure.