Problem
Physical Therapists are disconnected with their patients’ healing journey out of the office. This leads to the hindering of patients' injury healing process.
Healing Journey Tracking for Physical Therapy
Narrow down topic, analyze competitors and conduct user research using various research methods
Understand empathize with user needs, problems, and goals by creating personas, empathy maps, and journey maps
Started with storyboarding, interaction models, wireframe sketching, ui design and prototype
Perform usability testing based on wireframe sketches and also the full prototype
Physical Therapists are disconnected with their patients’ healing journey out of the office. This leads to the hindering of patients' injury healing process.
Cura PT is an ecosystem of wearable devices and mobile services that enables physical therapy practitioners to remotely monitor their patients while they share their daily progress during their healing journey, unlike The Ready State, Physera, or MedBridge Go apps.
With highly experienced physical therapists, real-life patients, PT aides and front desk staff
In total for a paper patient survey, an online patient survey and an online physical therapist survey
Field visits, observing and shadowing physical therapy offices
"A patient’s lifestyle factors play a huge role in hindering the healing progress—which we don’t know of once they leave the office."
"I feel great visiting at the office. Once I leave I get pain in my knee and I don’t know whether to rest or exercise to make it go away!"
Out of the injuries that patients are diagnosed; with 30% are knee injuries like ACL or meniscus
Physical therapists see their patients ideally 1-2x per week for maximum healing benefit
Patients should dedicate at least 20 minutes per day to complete prescribed exercise routine
"It would be useful to track/log pain throughout the week and share to my physical therapist"
"I feel better when communicating my concerns with my physical therapist"
During my field research visits, I collaborated with physical therapists for both the doctor's and patient's needs. I began ideating solutions and what features would be necessary for both the doctor and patient from my research data. As I shared my ideations, I received excellent feedback from the physical therapists. They shared their valuable medical knowledge to ensure I knew the proper anatomical function, terms, vocabulary, and the ins and outs of the human body healing in physical therapy.
I focused on sketching the high-fidelity user interfaces as clear as possible for usability testing before designing the user interfaces and prototype digitally — pencil before pixel. Using these high-fidelity wireframes as a paper prototype, I gained valuable feedback from patients and physical therapists at my next on-site field visit.
Penny’s physical therapist, Dr. Dan highly recommends using a wearable smart sleeve for her ACL knee injury at the start of her day. She puts it on her injured knee and syncs to the paired mobile app.
Penny starts her doctor recommended exercises on the app while her smart knee sleeve tracks her biometrics.
After completing each exercise, Penny sends a pain report to her doctor if she felt any pain while completing an exercise.
After completing all exercises, Penny can check on her activity stats which are being tracked by the wearable smart knee sleeve.
Dr. Dan receives a pain report notification from Penny where he is able to see what exercise she was doing while having pain.
Using the Agile UX Method, I created weekly objectives which documented what I built, measured, and learned. This method was extremely effective in getting the project done in the 12-week time.
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Cura PT mobile app for patients helps patients effectively keep track of their healing journey while receiving physical therapy.
Explore the prototype
