As an occupational therapist, you intend to help patients of all ages who are going through physical, cognitive, and social challenges to restore their capacity to participate in daily life.
Primarily you help them to increase their quality of life. But as a therapist, your job may not be so easy. You may sometimes have to go through emotional exhaustion due to extensive work pressure.
Undoubtedly the rehabilitative care field is full of clinical challenges.
You obviously dedicate your time and energy to assist your patients in achieving their therapeutic goals but often forget to conserve energy for yourself.
As an OT, you come across different types of patients who have either potential to recover or are unlikely to recover; especially when you deal with Aged care, you’re completely exposed to terminal illness and death. We understand how difficult it is to deal with death; it is emotionally stressful.
On the other hand, the most common challenges are patient non-compliance and non-adherence to treatment.
However, advanced technologies bring revolutionary changes to the rehabilitative care field, and these technologies help reduce work pressure and make your assessment process easy.
Artificial intelligence, Augmented reality, Virtual reality, Gamification, robotics, and application-based technologies are at your service. They can help you in many ways and support you in overcoming significant clinical challenges.
In this article, we will talk about everyday clinical challenges faced by Occupational therapists and how they can be resolved through technologies.
Overcome Clinical challenges through technologies
This medical field is emotionally stressful.
As an occupational therapist, you may occasionally deal with disturbing cases that leave you stressed and mentally exhausted. In some cases, emotional stress comes from patients’ family members or directly from your medical team. These associated stresses sometimes distract you from giving a seamless treatment plan.
In these cases, proper documentation could be very helpful.
Now you may think documentation will be a tedious job for each patient.
But with technology, you can save time.
Artificial intelligence helps you to make the whole documentation process easy and effortless.
- AI collects and simplifies patient history
- Takes all data of pre-existing disease and condition
- Records medication and supplements they’re consuming
- List out all symptoms and helps you to diagnose accurately
The pre-programming feature of AI will make your tedious job easy and help you continue your job in a stress-free manner .
It could be challenging for a few patients to visit physically at your clinic. In such cases, rather than adding stress on both sides, you can schedule their appointment online with the help of tele-rehabilitation.Telerehabilitation has become so realistic due to the integration of video conferencing and pre-programming features.
You can use occupational telerehabilitation and correctly assist your patients without putting yourself in a stressful situation.
Lot of options are available out there; You just need to utilize them for your own benefits without compromising the treatment.
If you’re under emotional stress, you won’t be able to deliver the best treatment to your patients; thus, we always support you in integrating cutting-edge technologies into your rehab care program. Technological involvement in occupational therapy helps to reduce your work stress and conserve energy for yourself.
Occupational therapy (OT); A physically demanding job
OT practice is undoubtedly physically demanding as it requires one to be on the feet, involves plenty of movements and lifting when working with patients in your chamber.
As we have seen, therapists are always in a hurry due to their busy schedules. It is hectic and strenuous to maintain this activity for long hours. In such cases, wireless motion trackers and AI-based robotic devices can help you in multiple ways.
How does a wireless motion tracker help you?
With the application of a wireless motion tracker, you don’t have to be always present with your patients; instead, you just have to attach it to the patient’s body, and your job is Made easier. This motion tracker technology retrieves the data from patients’ different movements and provides adequate information, which helps you to understand the actual misalignments; therefore, you can easily adjust the movement pattern.
When different languages create a communication gap
Break the language barrier with a Voice translator!
Doesn’t it sound interesting?
Yes, it is.
Now you can treat patients who speak a language other than English with the help of a voice translator; it is the application of artificial intelligence. It can translate into 64 languages, making communication more accessible, and you can deliver better treatment with ensured outcomes.
When patient Non-compliance is a big issue
Patients’ non-compliance remains a big issue in the field of rehabilitative care.
Occupational therapists also face the same, and it literally affects the implemented treatment outcomes.
Patient non-adherence to recommended treatment sometimes confuses you and forces you to think that the initial treatment is not working for your patient, and you intend to make a new therapeutic program. But the new training program may not be helpful either for that patient.
However, the latest technologies like Virtual reality and Gamification can help you to handle these problems.
Both of these technologies make the therapeutic process patient friendly and engaging. Even with these, patients like to enjoy the treatment, which directly increases patient compliance and adherence to treatment, and you can also do a better assessment.
Squegg, a US-based Company, has, “Digital grip strengthener”: It is specially designed for hand therapy exercises.
They’ve added an exciting twist that makes their product stand out from the crowd!
They integrate Gamification into this hand therapy device. Therefore, patients love to continue their exercise program, and therapists can do their job well.
If you’re treating a patient with upper limb complications, you can provide him this digital grip strengthener and check how it works!