Background: Individuals with patellar tendinopathy often exhibit impaired proprioception, which may contribute to symptom persistence and injury recurrence.A parallel robotic system based on a musculoskeletal knee model has shown valid and reliable performance for assessing joint position sense (JPS).This study aims to evaluate the feasibility of a protocol for the robotic assessment of knee proprioception in individuals with patellar tendinopathy and to compare their proprioceptive performance with that of healthy controls.Methods: Twenty-one participants with patellar tendinopathy (PTG) and fifteen healthy individuals (CG) (mean age: 32.36 (9.53) years) completed a single session of knee proprioception evaluation.JPS was assessed at 30 and 50 using passive (PJPS) and active (AJPS) repositioning tasks. Findings:The PTG exhibited greater absolute angular error than the CG during PJPS at 30 (p = 0.04) and 50 (p = 0.04), and during AJPS at 30 (p = 0.01), with no differences detected in the 50 AJPS task (p > 0.05).The feasibility analysis showed that perceived effort, difficulty, and pain were generally low, whereas comfort and satisfaction were rated highly.Interpretation: This study supports the use of a parallel robotic system as a viable instrument for assessing knee proprioception in people with patellar tendinopathy.Significant proprioceptive deficits were identified in this population compared to healthy controls, particularly in passive JPS at 30 and 50, and in active JPS at 30.
Muñoz-Gómez et al. (Sun,) studied this question.