SVPT — Experience and data collection (Article 3 in series)

Authors: Kalpana S Mair (B.P.T), Sushrut J Mair.

In these series of articles we would like to present and discuss a modular physical therapy biofeedback platform developed by us, which, in our opinion, can be an invaluable daily practice tool for therapists. The platform has been prototyped using the latest mature and proven technologies in the field of electronics and mobile device software. This is the third article where we describe how a therapy is managed using this prototype platform, the therapist & patient experience and how data is collected.

Other articles in this series: Article 1, Article 2.

Assuming that the system is available with the therapist, the very first thing they need to do is install the SVPT mobile application. The current prototype supports all Android versions KitKat onwards (4.4.4+). The app needs SD card read/write and Bluetooth permissions. After installation, the therapist runs the app to show the main menu screen.

Before the system can be used successfully, the therapist needs to perform a one-time setting update. They need to click on ‘SETTINGS’ and update the settings as shown below. The current crops of sensors have been designed in such a way that the therapist does not need to perform any calibration at all.

That is it. The system is now ready to be used in therapy. It takes just a few minutes after acquisition of the system to it being ready for therapy. There is no other configuration or setup to be done at all!

A typical workflow post this step is any one of the following:

• Create a new patient record (NEW PATIENT) — whenever needed.
• Connect to base box (CONNECT) — when starting therapy / biofeedback sessions.
• Load patient — view history (LOAD PATIENT > HISTORY) — when wanting to do trend analysis of a patient’s condition.
• Load patient — start therapy (LOAD PATIENT > START THERAPY) — when wanting to start a session.

Create a new patient record (NEW PATIENT):

The next thing to do is to create a patient profile. This is accessed by clicking the ‘NEW PATIENT’ button on the main menu, giving the screen below. Creating a new record is typically just a couple of minutes of work.

A couple of patient profiles are shown below (actual patient data — names masked for privacy):

Connect to base box (CONNECT):

This allows the app to connect to the base box so that a therapy can proceed. The phone’s Bluetooth must be on and the base box must be switched on.

Load patient — view history (LOAD PATIENT > HISTORY):

Allows the therapist to view past history of a patient’s performance in therapy — typically for trend analysis. The functionality is accessed by clicking on LOAD PATIENT button and then the HISTORY button. The graphs can be zoomed into a high level for detailed analysis — for e.g., view instances and characteristics of peaks (rounded / sharp / jerky), occurrence of plateaus and their characteristics (length/sharp/jerky) and so on. These give a good idea of the patients physical condition and help in correlation with their current state. Below we can see the graphs of the same patient, the left one at default zoom level and the right one is a capture of the graph zoomed in to view details.

Load patient — start therapy (LOAD PATIENT > START THERAPY):

Allows the therapist to start and manage the therapy session and also record it if needed. Accessed by clicking on LOAD PATIENT button and then START THERAPY button. This is the only functionality that requires a valid connection between the base box + sensor combo and the app. All other functionality can work offline without a connection. You can see a few videos of the live therapy screen in Article 2. One is reproduced below for convenience (jump to time = 41 seconds if you want to directly watch the live graph).

Data collection happens in the background when the REC switch is set to on (in the live therapy screen). This data is persistently and reliably stored on the therapist’s phone and can be viewed anytime via the History screen of a patient. This data is also the raw material for advanced analysis in the future.

That ends this 3rd article in the series which was written to give you an idea of how the app looks like and its usage by the therapist and the patient experience. To recap, if a patient profile has already been created, on a daily basis, all the therapist needs to do is switch on the base box, connect the app to it and get going.

As you may appreciate, the app packs in a lot of useful functionality but most importantly, it opens up previously unavailable data. We feel that the data collection this whole system enables is one the key aspects and as will be shown in future articles, leads to amazing insights and use cases that have never been available for exploration. Thank you for reading through this and drop us a note if you have questions!