My Physio: A Design of Speech to Text Telehealth Application to Facilitate Home Based Physiotherapy Session for Patients with Physical Limitation

Abstract

Patient adherence towards home physiotherapy sessions are perceived to be low due to the challenges physical disability patients face. A study done in Australia shows that out of 352 physiotherapists, the mean perceived rate of patient adherence towards home physiotherapy sessions was only 67%.  A majority of physiotherapists believed that patient self-management strategies were important in improving patient outcomes.  Amongst the barriers towards adherence include low levels of physical activity at baseline or in previous weeks, low in-treatment adherence with exercise, low self-efficacy, depression, anxiety, helplessness, poor social support/activity, greater perceived number of barriers to exercise and increased pain levels during exercise. This paper proposes MyPhysio, a design of a telehealth mobile based application to facilitate home based physiotherapy session for patients with physical limitation. This system enables physiotherapy sessions to be conducted via teleconferencing and enables activation of certain functions via speech, particularly starting and ending a teleconsultation or telephysio session.