Physical Augmented Reality Therapy, PART, is an augmented reality assistive application for physical therapy. It aims to increase patient engagement, follow-through, and cost-effectiveness for various PT settings. Through a minimally invasive AR implementation and compatibility with existing Web XR technologies, we provide physical therapists with real-time data and patient metrics, accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
The physical therapist (PT) experience has always been a mixture of appointments and patient motivation. Clinics see an average of 100 million - 200 million patients a day. Patients wanting to lower treatment costs for long term injuries saw an average of 72% savings compared to traditional medicine.
The average outpatient term PT patients is 7 - 10 sessions, yet only 35% of patients fully adhere to at-home exercises during this time. The goal of the project was to design an end-to-end experience for both PTs and patients to improve completing at home exercises for physical therapy. We wanted to create a seamless transition for physical therapy exercises from clinics to patient homes. This included a WebXR product to guide exercises for patients at home and a web platform to track patient data for PT clinics.
Patients felt a lack of motivation of completing at-home exercises.
Physical therapists had no idea of patients’ progress data in-between visits and whether patients were keeping up with their at-home exercises.
We leveraged WebXR to help guide patients to complete their exercises at the comfort of their own space.
We designed a web platform for PTs to help keep track of relevant patient information and their at-home exercise data practice.
As P.A.R.T. is both a business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) product, there were multiple domains to consider. On the patient side (B2C), the domain of our project consisted of elderly individuals, those with cognitive impairments. From our research we found that elderly patients often struggle with remembering prescribed home exercises, leading to missed days and longer treatments plans. Patients with cognitive impairments face these challenges as well, resulting in a demographic of patients for which traditional treatment methods create significant barriers to recovery. On the physical therapist side, we took the time to speak with licensed practicing PT's to discover major pain points. We took the time to look through the most common communication practices between patients and PTs regarding home exercises programs (HEPS), which were either: emails and/or via written on paper. However, a major pain point of this methodology was that PT’s had no idea if their patients were doing the exercises correctly or if they were doing the exercises at all.
Stakeholders: The stakeholders involved in our domain included elderly individuals, and those living with cognitive impairments. Also included are physical therapists who note issues with the way patient progress is monitored today—as well as dealing with a lack of resources for struggling patients.
We understood that the web portal for the PTs needed to encompass the data from the WebXR product while also being able to integrate patient electronic medical records (EMR) to maintain workflow. Our team took the time to explore different user flows and feature sets to see what would be plausible in our given time frame.
The user research was done in primary and secondary research methods. The primary research focused on patient survey and interviews, and clinical PT interviews. The secondary research encompassed domain immersion methods, AR subject matter experts, competitive market research, and generative product user story methods.
Based on patient surveys and interviews, majority of participants felt ambivalent or unmotivated to complete at-home exercises. Furthermore, half of the participants answered that they complete the at-home exercises at a casual or not often level, despite 75% of participants agreeing with the efficacy of the exercise. Likewise physical therapist interviews have shown the lack of confidence in patient’s diligence for at-home exercise regiment adherence.
In understanding that the two user bases needed separate products, our team decided to create a side by side experience to transition between the different two products. For the patients, we decided on a WebXR product to help guide their exercises at home, and for PTs, a way to access the exercise data in clinical settings.
Post-research, my work ownership combined on the interactions between the web portal and the immersive AR experience as well as a combination of certain areas with the overall platform experience. There are many technologies that exist in the PT space, created with the intention to serve PTs. Platforms like WebPT, Medbridge, Hep2G0, quickEMR, and PreHab, all exist and take up considerable market space. However these technologies operate solely on web and mobile platforms—therefore restricting their services to those limited platforms.
My work was tailored to involve data sets. Within the web portal for the PT's, displaying data in the most effective and easy way was crucial for the experience. Through trial and error, feedback and critique, certain elements from my sketches made its way into the next stage of the prototyping. Similarly with the web portal, my sketches also contributed to the big picture on how the experience of the patient will look in the WebXR portal.
We understood that the web portal for the PTs needed to encompass the data from the WebXR product while also being able to integrate patient electronic medical records (EMR) to maintain workflow. Our team took the time to explore different user flows and feature sets to see what would be plausible in our given time frame.
Once the team had a potential user flows for the overall product and a detailed information architecture, I started the design on the web portal. I took ownership of the adherence page (PT portal), sections of the dashboard, Log-In design for patient, gaming element for the patients in the AR experience, and sections of user interactions. The designs were completed during second half of Q1 (sketches to high fidelity prototype).
During Q2, our team made the pivot to host video analytics of patient exercise videos, after hosting stakeholder interviews and revisiting the overall product space. We knew that we wanted to leverage the patient exercise data to help PTs make data driven decision while preparing for the patients' next visit to the clinic. We understood the privacy concerns with the pivot and took the time to explore possible tech workarounds regarding patient privacy.
Once the pivot was greenlighted, I oversaw the integration of the video analytics workspace and the web portal during the pivot. Based on the new feature set for the video workspace, I partnered with two interaction designer to fully finalize the remaining display of a few data cards and used the new elements to organize into the Adherence page.
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We completed our work with an immersive high fidelity prototype of our interactive web portal for physical therapists and our interactive Augmented Reality experience portal for the patients of physical therapists.
Due to project time constraints, there were limitations regarding post-design validation data. However, the product validation methodology was to leverage Microsoft product desirability methods to determine market feasibility. Based on the data, the team would've either moved forward with product launch + implementation or back into design development. The products were also visually displayed at an exhibition.
The exhibition hosted a proof-of-concept of the WebXR + Web portal product and product design artifacts to communicate the design process.
This was by far the longest project I have had the opportunity to experience. Fortunately, our timeline provided space for our team to breath and take things step by step. We would ideally wanted to obtain more time to experiment with its launch or further finalize our high fidelity prototype but with our time constraint, we managed to pull one of the most attractive and creative product for the public to experiment in our exhibition. One thing I did learn during this project was to have the confidence to reach out to my teammates for help. We all had our areas to cover and there will be moments when you just need another hand. I wanted to prove my worth and abilities in this project and so I appreciate my teammates for trusting me but also being geninue with assisting me when I needed their help.