Patient Self Monitoring to Transfer Physical Therapy Exercise From Clinic to Home

Our objective is to develop an IBEHR (Image-Based Electronic Health Record) to help patients to transfer and reproduce at home the exercises they were prescribed by their physical therapist (PT) in clinic. More than 17 million (M) patients are diagnosed with conditions that may benefit from PT in the U.S. each year. Adherence to home exercise is the most important factor in functional recovery, and feedback from the exercise prescriber is the most important factor in achieving patient adherence. However in current practice the patient only gets feedback at clinic visits which may be weeks apart.

The proposed IBEHR will give patients visual feedback in real time comparing their performance at each repetition at home with a recording of themselves performing the exercise correctly in the clinic under the PT's supervision. The visual graphics show the patient how to better position his/her body and extremities. Such feedback is likely to improve adherence with the treatment regimen in terms of frequency, duration, and correctness of exercise, and thus facilitates transition of care between clinic and home.

The IBEHR is also a telemedicine tool because the patient can transmit recordings of home exercise to the PT for rapid review and feedback.

A third benefit of the IBEHR is to improve health care decision making by the PT. In current medical practice, it is difficult for a PT to determine why a patient fails to recover as expected. By recording the exercise performed at home, the IBEHR provides monitoring data that informs the PT whether the patient adhered poorly to prescribed exercise frequency or duration, the patient performed the exercise incorrectly, or the PT prescribed the wrong exercise.

Our Specific Aims are to 1) develop the IBEHR software, 2) perform alpha testing of device accuracy and beta testing of user interface ease of use, and 3) perform preliminary evaluation of the efficacy of the IBEHR to improve adherence.