The following is a guest article by Roy Shteren, PT MPHA, CEO & Co-Founder of WizeCare and Shai David, Solution Architect, Algorithm Developer, CTO & Co-Founder of WizeCare.
Only 30% of patients who receive outpatient physical therapy services attend all the visits their insurance company authorizes, costing practices about $250,000 in lost revenue per year. And of those who’d benefit from PT services, only 9.58% of people start an outpatient therapy program at all. There is a substantial disconnect in traditional, face-to-face physical rehabilitation environments due to numerous challenges in the receiving of care. Logistical and financial barriers associated with physical rehabilitation appointments for patients—particularly older patients, and patients who are suffering from neurological disorders—often result in the “no show phenomenon,” a trend with which clinicians are all too familiar. The quality of patient outcomes suffers as a result of patient nonadherence to physical therapy treatment plans.
On the care delivery and management side, providers face regulatory, logistical, and economic barriers associated with in-person rehabilitation that limit their scope of care options and their ability to expand service provision. Furthermore, the industry is experiencing a shortage of physical therapists and physical therapy professionals—estimated at 27,000—to meet the growing demand for services by 2025. From the payer side, the fee-per-session model creates an unsustainable system due to high expenditures as compared to value-based care provision. Lack of compliance to policies also results in penalties, and low policyholder satisfaction negatively affects star ratings.
Digital technologies have evolved to generate new, forward-thinking care platforms in the medical rehabilitation market. These have taken shape to include telemedicine visits enabled by video conferencing—the growth of which was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic—and user-friendly interfaces to deliver care in a seamless way. Unfortunately, without the ability to detect motion, these methods lack the precision required to support viable physical recoveries. The industry has also seen growth in hardware-supported physical therapy solutions using wearables. These complicated set-ups using various devices and Bluetooth connections have not demonstrated user-friendliness, particularly for older and complex patient populations who require seamless support for recovery.
Medical rehabilitation requires a personalized, accurate, and easy-to-use method to shorten patient recovery times through enabling care provision in natural environments. By utilizing a medical-grade AI platform, providers can present a comprehensive solution offering modules for effective and cost-efficient automated management of a holistic physical rehabilitation care cycle. Geared to clinically impaired individuals’ treatment, this cycle includes physical therapy treatment, patient monitoring, records, and nutrition. 
Powered by evidence-based clinical insights and advanced AI algorithms, WizeCare’s technology can meet the needs and progress of each patient, built on a complete understanding of clinical status at all treatment stages with modifications to protocols and methods as the condition evolves. Using MoveAITM, the notion of in-person, clinic-based treatment can be improved upon with the ability to measure and analyze a range of parameters that humans simply cannot achieve outside a specialized movement lab. Vast volumes of clinical data enable these advanced capabilities for physical rehabilitation so providers can offer intelligent, accessible, and measurable therapy care. AI is enabling patient successes through stronger PT adherence in the following ways.
1. Accuracy
When diagnosing and assessing medical rehabilitation patients, care providers must understand the efficiency of movement, measure range of motion and speed of motion, and detect indication of tremor or other movements of concern. With AI technology that is trained on extensive data sets, providers do not need to compromise on the quality of the instruction provided to their patients. Even remotely, PT providers can leverage a holistic solution that enables precision for confident care.
A medical-grade rehabilitation tool requires unparalleled accuracy of motion analysis.
Users are not performing workout movements in their living rooms as a fitness activity. In many cases, this from-afar therapy is facilitating recovery from serious injury, surgery, and/or clinical disease in patients of all ages with complex conditions.
2. Convenience
According to physical therapy patients, the need to complete their rehabilitation sessions face to face with providers creates various challenges. From travel requirements to scheduling difficulties to shouldering expensive co-pays, patients regularly stumble in meeting their in-person PT commitments. Outcomes, in turn, are negatively impacted.
Technology platforms that enable patients to perform rehab sessions at the time and place of their choosing—be it at home, in their workplace, or at a local park—provide both flexibility and comfort for optimal patient engagement. When the provider eliminates the hurdles to receiving medical care through unique applications of AI, the patient, in step, eliminates the excuses for failing to execute on the plan. In healthcare today, convenient care translates to meeting patients exactly where they are. Development of mathematical models backed by quality data has enabled this transformation.
3. Personalization
Medical rehabilitation technology can improve outcomes for patients only through tailor-made plans and personalized treatment. Through a software-only approach, applying advanced algorithms to data captured over mobile cameras enables detection of patient performance. By supplying feedback and knowledge in real time about the patients’ individual performance, the MoveAITM technology guides patients to execute exercises accurately and with reassurance regarding exact movements and related goals.
This real-time feedback complements pre-established personalized care plans for each patient that focus on achievable goals and specific recovery time forecasts. A synergy of high tech and high clinical value, these goals and forecasts are built on the patient’s condition assessed by a clinician and ascertained from the data gathered at each PT encounter. With this approach, every patient receives the exact treatment needed at that time and place of recovery.
4. Usability
Many of healthcare’s largest companies invest heavily in innovation for the sake of promoting progress: developers want to see a product work. But in the medical rehabilitation specialty, users have responded to product “upgrades” with frustration and noncompliance. It’s not enough that a product works; it has to perform seamlessly. When at-home PT systems emerged to include separate components and various Bluetooth and wired wearable devices, patients, by and large, met this at-home innovation with resistance.
The practical implementation failed to truly transform the way care was delivered. The optimal solution boosts engagement and improves outcomes by making the experience intelligent, exciting, and interactive. Applying AI and an augmented reality mirror effect right on the patients’ tablet, computer, or phone simplifies the entire motion analysis process so patients can focus on what matters most: completing their exercises correctly so they feel better.
The physical rehabilitation market has tried, without success, to leverage hardware-based motion analysis technology for in-home treatment. While hardware impeded scalability, the industry is now primed to meet smartphone users where they are, leveraging AI-based technology for new capabilities that include motion analysis; mobile access; built-in 2-D visualization via cameras; and analysis, scoring, and instruction of user performance in real-time. Pose estimation has enabled motion tracking like never before, and cloud-based solutions will provide higher accuracy due to scalable computing resources and parallel computations as well wider mobile device coverage. Many of the AI motion analysis solutions that have been on the market use gesture-based analysis or ML/DL analysis, which are limited in scope and accuracy, better applied to fitness and wellness apps.
An approach built on hybrid image processing and ML analysis produces an incredibly accurate solution optimized for physical rehabilitation via complete physical analysis, flexibility, and personalization, requiring very little maintenance. This is an exciting time in the development of healthcare IT applications, particularly for the physical therapy industry. The advanced functionality achieved in from-afar physical rehabilitation would have seemed impossible just years ago, a transformation made possible by data. A clinical service, physical rehabilitation is now immediately accessible and phenomenally accurate for all patients.
About Roy Shteren and Shai David
Roy Shteren, PT MPHA, and Shai David co-founded WizeCare to combine Shteren’s 15 years practicing physical therapy with David’s 15 years in software and communication systems development. Originally founded as Video Therapy in 2012 (rebranded to WizeCare in 2019) by both partners to minimize entry thresholds for patients on a global scale seeking rehabilitative physical therapy. The technology enables healthcare providers to deliver intelligent, accessible, and exciting physical therapy sessions directly to their patients’ homes, allowing healthcare organizations and insurers to provide measurable, affordable, and standardized quality of care.
