Every phenomenon has positive and negative consequences!
Covid-19 pandemic also has the same effect. We’ve almost overcome this pandemic situation, but its consequences are still there.
Consequence means not only the negatives but also positives as well.
The emergence of the coronavirus has thrown significant challenges to medical practices, especially in rehabilitative care, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and hand therapy.
you may also have faced the challenges of maintaining a decent level of contact with your patients while maintaining social distancing boundaries.
Delivering proper rehabilitative care without breaking the covid-19 safety protocol wasn’t easy at that time, whenPatients also didn’t prefer to come to the chamber .
However, rapid technological evolution helped therapists cope with new challenges and provide rehabilitative care in a new remote fashion.
Tele rehabilitation, mHealth (Mobile-application-based health assistance), and Virtual reality are the positive consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the rehabilitative care. Though the pandemic is over, these remote fashion technologies are still consistently helping therapists to overcome their everyday professional challenges and increasing patients’ compliance and adherence to the treatment.
These technologies can make your physical therapy training more customized and result-oriented.
Thus, it will be great to discuss these technologies , and their benefits.
Hope this article will motivate you to leverage the potential of advanced remote-fashioned technology.
Let's introduce the latest technologies that will make your physiotherapy training program more result-oriented yet patient-friendly
Tele rehabilitation
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The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic made physical therapy challenging because it requires direct contact with patients. But technology helped therapists to overcome this challenge.
Telerehabilitation; came as the The blessing – the technology that remotely links physiotherapists to patients. After the pandemic, telerehabilitation opens up a new approach to treatment.
As a therapist, you may also have used telerehabilitation at the time of the Covid-19 pandemic to help your patients. Therefore, you can definitely understand its importance nowadays.
Though the pandemic is almost over, therapists are continuing to use telerehabilitation for the following reasons:
- It enables the therapist to engage with patients and deliver treatment remotely
- Make the communication between patients and therapists easy
- Offer rehabilitation services to patients in their home environment
- Can track and monitor the progress of patients from anywhere
- Patient consultation, training, and education have become easier
- Good approach to treat physically disabled patients who are unable to come to the chamber
- It eliminates the associated travel expenses and time spent in traveling for both the therapist and patients
- Patients feel more comfortable to get treatment within their comfort zone, which leads to greater functional outcomes
- Additional video conferencing makes the whole process interactive and more realistic.
Now you may ask,” How do I measure the physical performance of my patients?”
Here physical performance means range of motion, flexibility, and steps.
Wearable and remote monitoring technologies will make your job easy. You can easily track and monitor your patients’ progress with the help of the above two revolutionary technologies, which are the new addition to rehabilitative care.
So, what are you waiting for?
Include the latest technologies in your tele-rehabilitative care and track patient engagement to specific exercise programs from your location.
Virtual Reality; The new addition to physiotherapy
You may have heard about Virtual Reality (VR) because it is very popular in video games.
Presently, VR goes beyond the entertainment domain and makes its hold on the medical field, especially in rehabilitative care fields like Physical and occupational therapy and hand therapy.
This latest technology has introduced therapists to a new approach to deal with their patients.
Before deep-diving into the topic, we would like to talk a bit about the i functional mechanism of VR.
With Virtual reality, patients are immersed in a holographic world instead of performing drills, and this environment partially captivates their senses. Therefore, they can do therapist-recommended movements in a better way without sensing a lot of pain, which in turn helps them to regain their range of motion.
Now you may think about how this technology will bring changes to Physiotherapy treatment.
The answer is here:
You can supervise your patient remotely with VR.
Under the VR therapy program, your patients will be constantly monitored by you despite being at their homes. You can track patient engagement in a specified exercise program from a remote location in real-time and access their progress data very easily.
All these real-time supervision processes help you to personalize physiotherapy training that ensures positive & quick outcomes. Even if you feel some exercises are not working for him or causing pain, you can also stop them immediately.
Application of Smart-phone in Physiotherapy
Mobile health (mHealth) has become an integrated part of healthcare and management after the Covid-19 pandemic. Now innovative phone applications are being used to schedule exercises in Physiotherapy.
mHealth increases patient adherence and thereby improves health outcomes.
Now physiotherapists worldwide use mHealth to provide personalized home exercise programs (HEP) to speed up the overall rehabilitation.
These smartphone applications are going to help you in multiple ways. With this, you can tailor HEP for your patients that target their specific problems.
With a mobile application, optimize your HEP in these ways:
- Schedule exercise for patients
- Modify with repetitions
- Include additional strengthening/ endurance components
Your patients can do these personalized exercises in their home environment, which ensures improvements in the pre-existing condition. You can even monitor the progress throughout the time.
Apart from personalized training sessions, mHealth is now in the good books of healthcare professionals, even therapists, because of its cost-effectiveness. It is a very common scenario when patients fail to attend scheduled appointments, which causes a loss of revenue and a prolonged waiting list.
In this case, you can easily prevent cancellations through an effective reminder system of application.
While we are talking about mobile applications and their benefits, we can’t skip the advantages of application-based devices in physiotherapy and hand therapy.
One famous application-based blue-tooth enabled device is Squegg smart digital hand gripper. Your patients can integrate this device with their smartphone through its application, and the device will share patients’ grip counts, and grip strength through application, which help you to evaluate the actual outcome of the hand strengthening exercise. Even this application-based Squegg device increases patience compliances and adherence to the recommended hand therapy.