Designing an interface to improve the rehabilitation process for knee surgery patients

Abstract

Knee surgery patients often go through an extensive knee rehabilitation program that requires both clinic visits with a physical therapist and prescribed at home exercises; patients, however, have limited access to feedback on how well they perform during their at home sessions. We supplement a previously developed prototype wearable knee device, PT Viz, with an interface that displays at home session data and progress and allows patients to set goals and share their data with a therapist. We iteratively designed an interface using two paper prototypes by conducting a user study with 12 participants who had recently undergone knee surgery. We then confirmed participant preferences during a follow-up survey with the final prototype design, and implemented the PT Viz Mobile Android application to accompany PT Viz. We discovered that knee surgery patients thought viewing their progress and setting goals improved motivation to do prescribed exercises, and that patients wanted to involve their therapists in using the system. We hope that this system can both improve compliance and encourage concordance, and propose a field study to further investigate the usefulness of the system.