Helping patients take control of their physical rehabilitation journeys.

PT PAL

Challenge

My Role

How might we educate patients on the value of Physical Therapy and help them stay motivated and accountable with their exercise programming throughout their recovery?

UX Research,Product Design, Interaction Design, Prototyping & Branding

Year

Timeline

Tools

2023

3 months

Figma, Miro, Adobe Photoshop

Welcome to PTPal

Onboarding + Workout Overview

The member first receives an invite to join PTPAL from their provider. Once they confirm their identity, they are welcomed onto the platform with a quick detailed summary of the service offerings and how to begin using the platform.

TV Pairing + Guided Workouts

Next, to get started with a workout, the member also has the option to pair the app to their TV. Simply start the workout and follow along by viewing guided videos of each exercise.

Mirrored Workout

Here, members can receive more visual cues to perform their exercises. Members can view themselves performing exercises while the app keeps track of sets and reps. And if they perform an exercise incorrectly, they can also receive real time audio feedback on corrections/improvements.

Exercise Details

Once a member begins working out, they are able to input specific workout

details to report back to their provider

(i.e Reps,Pain Level, etc)

Exercise Submission

Once a member is done with their workout, they can then leave feedback for their provider, and attach any videos that they took to receive feedback later. Here, they can also message their provider by using the in house messaging service at any given time.

Progress Overview

Finally, as the member uses PTPAL over time, they can also check in on their recovery progress, look over achievements and look at how they’re progressing over time based on set goals.

01 Understand

Context

In the Winter of 2021, I suffered a major injury to my right knee (a complete ACL,MCL and Menicus tear) that went on to define a large portion of my college experience. Although I was eventually able to recover with the help of my team of physicians and Physical Therapists, the journey there was nothing but simple.

I oftentimes found myself disheartened by what felt like a never ending recovery timeline, experienced confusion around exercises and anxiety from a lack of consistency with my exercise programming. All of these issues would go on to prolong my recovery journey. For these reasons, I knew that there were still some major gaps within the Physical Therapy space that needed to be addressed.

Over the course of a few weeks, I asked various questions around Injury recovery. This lead to the first half of this project being mainly research, interviewing, and exploring concepts within the Health and Fitness space that I found interesting. Luckily, I was able to talk to various people about my topic, including practicing physical therapists, collegiate sports medicine experts and physical therapy students

Problem Definition

How might we educate patients on the value of Physical Therapy and help them stay motivated and accountable with their exercise programming throughout their recovery

Discovery

With these question in mind, I began to interview patients about their experiences undergoing Physical Therapy as well as Physical Therapists around their challenges working with patients.

I chose patients with different ailments (trauma injuries, preventative care, sports affiliated injuries) in different life stages, with different lifestyles. The interviewees also had various levels of fitness experience, ranging from collegiate athletes to individuals who rarely exercised at all.

These are the insights I found:

Highlights:

Lack of Motivation- Therapists normally notice a plateau in patient motivation when their body start feeling “normal”. This often leads to a distruption in their exercise programming and prolonged recoverys.

Knowledge Gap- There is a large knowledge gap between patients and physical therapists around physical therapy exercise programming and language/jargon associated with the healthcare industry

Lack of Mental Health Resources- There is a direct correlation between mental health disorders (depression,anxiety) and a patients recovery, yet there are currently very minimal resources provided for supporting a patients mental health.

Pain Points:

More Accountability - Therapists want more ways to track progress outside of therapy sessions and Patients lack a concise way to track and report their workouts leading to lack of consistency.

More Inclusivity- Therapists struggles to adequately support and educate patients who are non native english speakers.

More guidance- Patients want more guidance and feedback when performing PT at home to ensure proper form

02 Gain Confidence

Ideate + Iterate

Design Goals

Enable patients to view their daily exercises in a concise manner

Enable PT's to track their patients workout consistency

Enable patients to receive detailed info on how to perform their exercises at home (i.e exercise details, audio guidance, etc)

Enable patients to input performance feedback on workouts (i.e report sets, reps, discomfort, etc)

Enable patients to track their recovery over time to have a better understanding of how they are progressing

I began creating prototypes not as a way to validate my concepts, but rather to learn what I should be building towards in the first place. My wireframes included some of the main interactions listed above including training plans, exercise detail inputs, guided workout instructions, etc.

My first version included a mobile app paired alongside an apple watch app. This was devised in order to give the end user more autonomy while following the guidance of the app

Version 1 : Mobile App + Watch

Feedback & Insights

Balancing coordination and feedback between the mobile app and the watch

There were hesitations around having to balance inputting feedback solely on the watch app in tandem to using the mobile app for guidance. Was the watch app really necessary to keep the patient on the same page without being redundant?

Screen real estate could be better used to display information

I had originally created pop up screens for guided videos and exercise details, but some of these screens lacked visual hierarchy causing users to get overwhelmed by the amount of input tabs and information

The need for guidance when performing exercises in real time

Users shared that although having videos would be helpful when remembering exercises, they lacked confidence when performing exercises themselves due to the subtleties in form

With the given feedback, I decided to test out a different version of the initial concept within a TV interface. The intention behind crafting an experience with a TV was to be able to create a workout experience that mirrored the patients motions so that they would watch themselves going through the exercises in real time alongside the guided videos.

Version 2 : TV

Feedback & Insights

Utilizing AI to keep track of sets and give real time feedback

We worked with our therapist to design a tailored 3D mesh during an exercise that shows the correct exercise position once a patient reaches an exercise’s tension point.

Considering TV screen
UI guardrails

Some participants expressed that the general layout of the UI gave the sense of a touchscreen device, this made me take a step back to analyze TV UI guidelines as

Final Technology Touch points

I aimed to design an experience that used existing technologies in patients’ homes. Through my iterations, I compiled three devices that could work together as a system:

Motion tracking camera with lidar sensors to keep patients in frame while performing exercises

Mobile phone to follow along and input feedback onto while going through the assigned workouts

TV that could display the video footage capturing the patient