A technology probe of wearable in-home computer-assisted physical therapy

Abstract

Physical therapists could make better treatment decisions if they had accurate patient home exercise data but today this information is only available from patient self-report. A more accurate source of data could be gained from wearable computing designed for physical therapy exercise support. Existing systems have been tested in the lab but we have little information about issues they may face in home settings. We designed a technology probe, SenseCap, and deployed it for seven days in ten physical therapy patients' homes. SenseCap is a wearable physical therapy support system that gathers patient exercise compliance and performance data and summarizes the data in charts on an iPad Dashboard for physical therapists to view when patients return to the clinic. In this paper, we present the results of our deployment, show in-home patient exercise data gathered by the probe, and make design recommendations based on patient and physical therapist responses.