DEUHR - Remote Therapy experience
How to improve the experience of remote rehabilitation for patients and therapists?
Time
Client
Project type
Role
Sept 2022
Villa Beretta Clinic
Healthcare
Product Designer
Tools
Figma, Fusion360
Problem outline
The progressive aging of the population and the recent spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to an unprecedented need for rehabilitation services, burdening clinics and therapy professionals far above the limit.
In this context, remote therapy solutions represent a valuable alternative to ease the management of therapies when patients are eligible to get back home and follow their gradual path to regain motion and cognitive capabilities. However, the lack of proper interaction patterns for therapists and patients and sometimes users' poor confidence with technology make these solutions ineffective.
The solution
DEUHR - Digital Exergame for Upper-Limb and Hand Rehabilitation provides rehabilitation clinics with a modular system for the management of remote rehabilitation.
Starting from the specific case of post-stroke upper-limb motion impairments, DEUHR features a sensing device able to track patients’ motions' quality during exercise. Remotely, therapists can plan, monitor, and cooperate with other colleagues in providing patients with the most suitable therapy path.
Patients App
Patients have eased access to daily training scheduled in their therapies. A full eye on the therapy process is provided through the calendar of activities and monitoring of score and progresses of exergames.
Feedback and contact with doctors are provided through a functional chatbot and a phone line with clinic personnel.
Daily Training
Calendar of Activities
Check goals and progresses
Chatbot and Phoneline
Therapists App
Therapists can follow all glances of therapies: from initial setup (with anamnesis and measurements) to daily monitoring of ROM, completion rates, and reaction time, to fine-tuning adjustments of exercise plan remotely.
Therapist
All patients accessed by the clinic are available from therapists' profiles allowing cooperation among colleagues.
Therapy setup
Progress Monitoring
Training schedule planning
In-clinic patient management
Sensing device - IMU
Bridging the two digital experiences, an Inertial Measurement unit keeps track of patients' performance during exercises, monitoring Ranges of Motions of targeted body areas.
Process
The main partner of this project has been the rehabilitation clinic of Villa Beretta (the presidium of the Valduce Hospital in Lecco, Italy). Their team of therapists and clinic engineers asked the team for a viable usage of specific hardware developed in Polimi for the daily management of remote therapy.
Define - Industry
The first step of the design process consisted of desk research and user-focused research. We started with an understanding of the state of the art of remote therapy services. Major lacks encountered in case studies highlighted two different clusters of quality solutions.
Define - Users
We arranged our strategy by gathering as many insights as possible about users (patients mainly) through desk research activities that we clustered through the Jobs-to-be-done matrix and Empathy map.
After that, we moved to directly get in touch with users (patients, therapists, and clinic engineers) to fill the gaps. Through structured interviews, we aimed to cover technical aspects of therapy and remote therapy and feelings and emotions perceived during therapies.
Develop - Experience Mapping
Having considered the massive lack of UX Design in the case studies analyzed, we worked side by side with clinicians to spot all the criticalities and specific needs of the clinic and fulfill them respecting remote therapy protocols. After this first step, we were able to map down a remote therapy experience framework that could work in the long run before developing any kind of physical and digital solution.
Develop - Solution Architecture
The development process involved the building and testing of a device case for the IMU, a digital exergame controlled through the IMU sensor and UX/UI of two applications (patients and therapists).
Being the only designer on the team, I took into account the development of the device case (which I aimed to provide with a good level of affordances when sketching its shapes) and the digital experiences that I am going to explain a bit here.
Develop - Information Architecture
Having cleared out the main features of a remote therapy service, the first step of the re-design has been the implementation of the Information Architecture. In this step, I thought it crucial to involve users in co-designing the digital experiences.
Through online Card Sorting and Tree Testing, I went through several iterations until the definitive structure was just right. I involved users both from the clinic (concerning the amount and typology of features), generic users (for testing the intuitiveness of patients’ application), and medical professionals (for testing the ease of use of the therapist app and delivering a product that would not fit just the partner clinic).
Prototype and Test
Given the complexity on many sides of this project (amount of touchpoints to design, typology of users, degree of the development requested by the client,…) testing has been quite an omnipresent activity in the process.
Considering the large range of exercises and targetable body areas on which a set of IMUs like the one we used can work, we decided to focus on the specific case of elbow flexion exercise.
To do so, we worked out a demonstrator of the training experience made by:
- an IMU sensing device (with case) applied on a stick (that eventually, we tested with the Wearnotch system to test the accuracy of data gathered),
- a coded endless-runner video game (where we could set difficulty and targets to hit),
- a coded demo of the training experience flow from the patient application able to run the game,
- a custom data visualization made with MS Excel and MatLab to convey data gathered
Conclusions and learning outcomes
This project drained a lot of resources in terms of time, patience, and skills (exploiting old and forging new ones as well). For the first time in my career, I had to face a complex challenge in terms of expected results and impact. In university projects, you usually don’t go much further than a good prototype and nicely-pitched concept but this time I felt that my contribution, my vision, and my choices all over the process may generate an impact on people’s lives.
The major learning outcome has been the management on my own of the whole design process. There is no doubt that something could surely have been done better (user research presented huge obstacles in terms of activities that we could have done with users), but handling all the steps for the first time in my career helped me improve my capacity of working on the big picture of a complex project rather than focusing on delivering pixel-perfect details.
Last but not least, this project tested my capacity to be in empathy with users. This is something that we designers may tend to take for granted. This challenge made me understand more than ever before how much more easily I can get to the heart of the problem by getting close to the user.