The crunching of your knee could soon help doctors determine whether your joints are healthy or not.
Professor Omer Inan, from Georgia Institute of Technology, used to be a discus thrower and, as a result, has put some serious stress on his knees over the years.
Putting his experience of knee pain to good use, Inan is now in the process of creating a device which detects crunching knee sounds.
He explained that the acoustic pattern of an injured knee is markedly different from that of a healthy knee.
"It’s more erratic," he said. "A healthy knee produces a more consistent pattern of noises."
His device uses contact microphones which measure the vibrations of the surface of the skin.
The sounds are then translated into graphs which, in the future, could become useful to doctors and help them determine whether the convalescing joint is healthy or if it needs more therapy.