This paper won the Sue Bogner Healthcare Technical Group Best Student Paper Award at HFES 2019.

Team: Rua M. Williams, Kiana Alikhademi, Emma Drobina, Juan E. Gilbert, Tommy Sutor

Research has shown that patient adherence to prescribed in-home regimens impacts recovery and overall health. However, many patients do not fully adhere to in-home regimens, due to low social support, perceived lack of time or space, or increased pain during exercises. We wanted to help determine what it will take for therapeutic AR to be widely adopted in practitioner and patient relationships and patient homes. Our study had two major contributions: 1) we collected multiple patient and practitioner perspectives of AR/VR in therapy to build a more generalizable understanding of design for in-home rehabilitative experiences, and 2) we created an AR system for physical therapy and piloted it with several experienced physical therapy patients and a number of novice non-patient users.

Diagram showing how the Kinect data server connects the therapist's computer to the Kinect sensor and the HoloLens. The sensor and the HoloLens work together to create the patient's view.

Our experimental setup is shown above.

As part of the team, I scheduled and ran experimental sessions, co-wrote the paper, and presented our research at the 2019 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society International Meeting.