Phio Engage is a native app designed to provide patients suffering from an MSK condition with a tailored rehab programme they can follow at home.
Project
Role: Head of Design - Product Designer - Motion Designer
Team: 1x Senior UX Designer, 1x Mid-Weight UI Designer, 5 Developpers, 1x QA Tester.
Brief
Traditional care paths for MSK conditions only have a 40% success rate of full recovery. Design a solution to reduce friction and increase this poor success rate.
Our first goal was to understand why the success rate of full recovery was so low. We started with Desk Research by reading all the medical studies we could find on the matter. We then started talking with Physios and Patients to get the full picture of the problem.
Personas
Talking with patients really helped us understand the hurdles they were going through. From these interviews, we distilled the insights into 7 personas that encapsulate all industry-specific information.
Areas of Focus
Our research led us to focus on 6 main areas that have been shown to be overly important to patients and have an immense impact on their chances of full recovery.
In order to reduce waiting times we had to look at the end-to-end experience. From the moment of injury to the moment when the patient starts treatment.
This happens in two events:
- Assessing the injury as soon as possible.
- Starting treatment as soon as possible.
Phio Access’ primary purpose is to assess the patient's injury in the shortest timeframes and signpost the patient to the most suitable care path. See more here.
Phio Engage will then use this diagnostic to provide a tailored programme the patient can start immediately.
One of the biggest hurdles patients face during their rehab is that they are sent home with generic exercises explained on a sheet of paper.
They don’t understand the exercises, how to do them, when to do them or if they are doing them right.
Because of these challenges, they end up not doing them which is really detrimental to the healing process.
Phio Engage provides patients with an exercise programme bespoke to their injury guided by videos and voice instructions.
Computer Vision
Some exercises require precision to be efficient and unique guidance to help the patient do the movements correctly.
Computer Vision ensures the system understands whether the position is correct or how to amend it.
Computer Vision also helps understand the patient's range of movement and calculate the improvement over time.
Patients have a lot of misconceptions when it comes to their injuries like avoiding moving to prevent aggravating it. Most of the time, that is actually the opposite.
Patients also want to be involved in their rehab.
They want to understand why they’re asked to follow a programme, what the benefits are, and what elements will speed up their recovery.
We inform the patient at every opportunity during their experience but also have an open line of communication with clinicians to provide them with extra information and the support they might need.
When it comes to supporting patients, it’s not just talking with them and removing their concerns. We have implemented multiple feedback loops throughout their experience to identify all sorts of flags so clinicians can take action and pause, regress or progress their programme to ensure the patient heals in the best conditions and feel supported along the way.
Finding the motivation to do their exercises is often challenging for patients. We focused on rewarding patients when they engage with their rehab to create a sustainable behaviour change.
Celebrating their achievement has shown to be one of the most powerful motivators.
Other white-hat motivators have been implemented like personalisations to create ownership, providing information to create empowerment and on MVP 2 we are implementing achievement leaderboards to take advantage of social influences.
Quantified self as shown to be one of the biggest trends in multiple industries such as Fintech and Fitness. Today people expect to be able to self track and monitor their progress.
This trend has proven to be quite efficient when it comes to boost motivation and challenge patients to push themselves.
Video Trailer
Although it was Phio Access that managed to grab the attention of the industry, it was Engage that transformed this interest into contracts with some of the leading Insurers and Health providers.
