Colton Hamlin
Senior Project Final Draft
Rehabilitation App
Introduction
For my senior project I chose to focus on
rehabilitation. Because rehabilitation
will be incorporated in my everyday life once I begin my career, I thought it
would be beneficial to come up with a way to positively affect rehabilitation
in some way. I used this idea to create
an app that provides efficient workouts, direct communication, and immediate
access to benefit both the therapist providing the rehabilitation as well as
the patient doing the rehabilitation.
Rehabilitation is an area of interest for me
because I plan on using it during my career as an Occupational Therapist. I have had to participate in rehabilitation
because of injuries I’ve had in the past and observe acquaintances go through
rehab as well. Throughout all these
experiences, I have gained much interest in bettering the accessibility and
efficiency of rehabilitation.
I chose to do an app because technology is
becoming so advanced that things that were once difficult and time consuming
are now easy and almost immediate. In this day and age, near everyone has a
smart phone and is becoming more and more tech savvy. In my research I found
that there is an app that allows the sender to send out a message to multiple
recipients but doesn’t have to allow them to respond. This is beneficial to the
therapist because he can still get messages across quickly, but keep from getting
bombarded with replies.
A
review of literature that addresses the issue.
I
was unable to find any literature that addressed this issue of needing an app
for physical therapy. I believe this is because there are tons of apps out
there for physical and occupational therapy, but none with the focus that I
have created. I exhausted several hours researching articles for this issue and
came up empty handed. I also exhausted several more hours researching apps that
were the same or even remotely in the same ball field. The problem I found with
most of these apps as well is that they always cost money to see how they work
either online or the app store. The ones that I did get into were either just for
the instructor or just an anatomy and diagnosis app.
At
the beginning of my senior project I thought I would be able to create an app
that helps with physical rehabilitation. Once I got into the project I realized
I was ill equipped to create an entire app and that it was a bite too big for
me to chew. I did not have the technology or resources to create the app, so I
decided to create the idea and conceptualize the app with hopes that in the
future I would be able to pitch the app to someone and have it finished.
The
design of my app with be unlike anything I’ve researched or seen thus far. Not only will my app give workouts for
patients to complete and progress in their shoulder rehabilitation, the app
with also track their progress with an accelerometer technology and smartphones
(or other technological devices). The
accelerometer technology will be able to track the angles and movements of
their arms and shoulders to see their range of motion and speed. Having the accelerometer technology
implemented in the app will give immediate feedback to the therapist so they
will be able to treat a patient right away, see the patients’ progress, and
make precise adjustments to a quicker and more efficient rehabilitation and
recovery.
The
issue I found is that therapists have a hard time keeping up to date with
patients after they leave the rehabilitation center. This is a problem because
therapists are only able to see them a few times a week, so they have to assign
home workouts to their patients. If the
patient forgets what rehabilitation exercise they are supposed to do or how they
are supposed to do the rehabilitation, it stunts their progress and decreases
their satisfaction. When the therapist
cannot see the patient face-to-face each day, it is hard for them to keep track
of accurate progress in their rehabilitation.
The app allows the therapist to eliminate this issue by seeing immediate
progression or regression of the patient and modifying the workout as
such. Having patients do home workouts
without the accelerometer technology and only seeing them three times a week
makes the progress slower and not as beneficial as it could be. The therapist is more educated and can see
patterns each day he wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. While I have been job
shadowing I have been able to see how they use a protractor to measure range of
motion. With accelerometer technology It will take educated guessing and
“trying to get it as close as possible as last time” out of the equation.
Your project plan with measurable objectives.
My
plan was to do research to find a specific part of rehabilitation that I could
focus on for this project and then create an app for that specific part. I
chose the shoulder and arms because I was unable to find an app that would
focus on just this. I decided to interview 5 therapists here in St. George that
I had access to and ask them these questions:
1.
What apps do you currently use?
2.
Which ones are most helpful?
3.
What attributes would you require for an app?
4.
How often do you think you would use these
attributes?
After I came up with my
plan of creating a shoulder app that therapists and patients can use in unison
and will measure angle and speed (using an accelerometer) I gave a simple outline
of the app and asked those same therapists if this was something they would be
interested in. One therapist mentioned, “This
app would be a game changer.” Another
therapist stated, “If you could create an app like this that was reliable, I
would use it every single day.” Each
therapist responded to this idea and said they would use this app with nearly
every shoulder patient. After I gained their approval, the next step was to
conceptualize the app and create how the app would work step by step. This
required great hours of research of practical use for the app. For example, I
wanted to know if the app would be able use the accelerometer tech inside a
cell phone or if I would have to use another source, such as Arduino
Technologies accelerometer.
Analysis of the plan's effectiveness -
observational research, data analysis, application to identified PLOs.
The
plan was effective and executed as planned, but it was not where I wanted to
end. I would like to continue and finish the app to creation because I believe
it is something that could have a great impact on the industry. Thus through
the plan I was able to meet my three PLOs, critical thinking, research, and
content creation.
First
I began researching to find out what kind of app I should focus on, what other
apps were out there, and how mine could be different. I completed five
interviews to understand from another source how this app could be effective.
Carrying out these interviews was an essential part because the therapists that
I interviewed had experience in the field and with other apps and could give me
current and experienced feedback. The remainder of the research came from
observing therapy and researching hardware and remaining required for the app.
My
second PLO was critical thinking. My critical thinking came from trying to
think about which route to take and how to create the app. Several questions
have to be answered when creating an app. For example, how easy is it going to
be to operate this app for the user, how can I improve any aspects of this app,
or what is the most efficient way to go about this? This was an important learning objective in
this project because if the app isn’t efficient, doesn’t meet the needs of its
user, and doesn’t provide more attributes than the other apps out there, there
would be no reason for anyone to purchase or use it.
My
last PLO was content creation. Overall,
my entire app was a creation. I had to
come up with the idea of the app, research what tools were used to do
rehabilitation on shoulders, find out what other apps were already out there,
how therapists could communicate immediately to their patients that were not in
the office, and figure out how I would effectively combine all of them into one
efficient product that differed from all the rest. But using this learning objective, I analyzed
my target audience more and tried to figure out the best way to help them. Analyzing my target audience was beneficial
because I was able to get direct feedback in the field I was targeting to see
what be effective and what would not work.
Discussion - self-evaluation of performance,
good, bad, ugly.
When
I look back at what I could have done differently, I cannot think of many
things I would be able to change unless I was able to take the knowledge I have
now. I spent countless hours researching to figure out what I was supposed to
do and how I could possibly achieve my goal of creating an app. This was my first time ever creating or doing
anything with an app. Based on my
efforts to research and time spent interviewing people in the field I wanted to
impact, I feel I did well on this project. I reached out many resources to help me
communicate if what I was doing was effective and got outsiders perspective. I
wish I would have more time this semester to finish everything for a pitch to a
company to create the app, but I’m hoping that will be in the near future. The
only thing I would change, as far as research goes, is to interview patients
that would be using this app. I was able to talk to several people about it,
but was never able to do a formal interview with questions for data
logging. Overall I feel my project and
efforts were the best I could give with the time I spent.
Attachments, supporting documents, screen
shots of Insights and/or Google analytics data.
1. Login
a.
Therapist or Patient. (Therapist would set up the patient so that
anyone could not just use it)
b.
Email
2.
User
home screen would display todays workout
3. Therapist
a.
Home screen
i. Manage
Patients
1.
Add or delete patients (archive)
2.
Choose patients
a.
Manage workouts
i. Choose
workouts
3.
Data base of workouts
a.
Create and delete workouts
ii. Schedule
1.
Today’s patients
a.
Manage workouts
2.
Manage schedule
a.
Reschedule
4.
Need to integrate the use of fit bit or
Microsoft band for heart rate and duration of workout. Only optional if they do
not have the Microsoft band the app will still work.
5.
Data log of range of motion therapy of
achievement measurement therapist measures it logs using smart phone technology.
This would create a better understanding of what workouts, angles, and speeds
are having positive and negative outcomes
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