During the COVID-19 pandemic, health facilities have been looking for alternatives to in-person appointments to reduce the spread of the virus. Specifically, I wanted to help physical therapists as they are at high risk with one of the highest contact rate with patients among healthcare workers, averaging 16.7 direct patient contacts per hour.
As the product designer for my hackathon team, I conducted user research, identified user pain points, led brainstorming with my team, and created mockups of the physical therapist and patient web portals during the two-day hackathon. Later, I refined my designs, added features, and created high-fidelity prototypes.
To better understand the pain points of both stakeholders, physical therapists and patients, I surveyed 2 physical therapists and interviewed 3 physical therapy patients. These patients had varying physical therapy treatment frequencies and were either in the process of moving their sessions online or were currently online.
Combined with research from American Physical Health Association and peer-review medical journals, I identified two main problems:
-> How might we create a centralized platform for both patients and physical therapists to continue their physical therapy sessions safely and effectively?
When ideating, there were three key experiences to address:
The Crazy 8's is a quick sketching exercise that challenges us to sketch eight distinct ideas in eight minutes. I use this exercise to push past the 'first-order ideas' or the ideas that most readily come to mind, and dig deeper into what unexpected connections I can make.
Our goal was to explore what experiences or technologies can get as close to real-time feedback as possible for physical therapy patients. I led our team ideation brainstorming and made quick sketches of our ideas.
For interaction input, we felt most drawn to #5 because it requires minimal equipment / is low-tech for users.
For interaction feedback, we felt most drawn to #8 because leveraging available technology to give initial real-time corrections means patients will have guidance when practicing their exercises between their physical therapy appointments.
Informed by the pain points of physical therapists/patients, we used these two interactions to define the key experience of physyou. physyou is an asynchronous telehealth platform for physical therapy patients to get real-time feedback on the accuracy of their at-home exercises. Their physical therapists are able to prescribe exercises and monitor their progress.
Physical therapists will upload a "model video" representing 100% accuracy of an exercise. Using the patient's webcam and computer visioning technology, physyou will compare the patient's performance against the model video to assess accuracy.
For the patient, physyou will give real-time corrections, like "Extend your arm further out," if exercises are being performed incorrectly. If the exercise is performed accurately, the counter will be incremented, ensuring patients complete their prescribed exercise reps correctly. At the end, patients will receive an accuracy score to help track progress.
For the scope of the hackathon, I wanted to focus on how physical therapists prescribe and monitor patient progress and how patients track their progress and practices their exercise between appointments.
I mapped out the user experience for the physical therapist (doctor) and patient.
Then, I sketched a rough wireframe of the primary experience, so our team's front-end developer could begin building the structure of the site while I refined the layout and features in Figma.
Note: The designs shown are mockups that were cleaned up after the hackathon.
Physical therapists will have a portal with their patients sorted by upcoming appointment times. Other features include inviting patients, a real-time activity log of patient activity, and panel for quick notes.
Physical therapists prescribe exercises to their patients, defining repetitions, duration, and intensity depending on the injury and severity. They will also upload a model video that physyou processes for pose recognition and uses as the standard for 100% accuracy to grade the patient's practice sessions and provide real-time corrections.
Patients will see their prescribed exercises on their portal. The calendar displays their progress in completing each day's prescribed exercises, helping track progress and encourages accountability.
Patients will practice each exercise and receive real-time corrections with a counter that will increment when a repetition is performed accurately.
A closer look at the different features and interactions. If the demo video doesn't autoplay, click on the Play/Pause button on the bottom right corner!
Add Exercise
Edit Exercise
Add Patient
Activity Log
Reveal Notes
Practice Exercise
I worked with 3 other talented developers on my team (1 frontend, 2 backend) that helped make this idea come to life. We built a computer visioning model and implemented pose recognition to give real-time corrections and determine performance accuracy. Here is a live demo of it!
1. Don’t overlook traditional pencil and paper (or a tablet and stylus)
I had less than 48 hours to bring this idea from concept to final mockup. The time constraint of a hackathon pushed me to hone in on the purpose of each stage in my design process and how I could execute it in its most barebones form.
I found that hand sketches are really quick and effective to ideate concepts and communicate my ideas with the engineers on my team. I was able to prioritize the goal of lo-fi wireframes — outlining the site layout and elements — and get initial feedback, before bringing it into a design software like Figma. Sketching is now an integral part of the ideation and wireframing stages of my design process.
2. Having a broad understanding of multiple disciplines makes me a better designer.
I have some background in programming and I was relatively familiar with some of the concepts and tools the engineers were using to build our project. Having a shared language meant I could ask relevant questions and communicate effectively with the engineers. I was able to look at the product holistically and think critically about what features would add to the user experience, as opposed to just implementing features that would just be technologically cool.