Understanding User Needs for Injury Recovery with Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper explores how augmented reality can improve in-home physical therapy by understanding patient needs, identifying challenges, and proposing design considerations for body motion visualizations to enhance engagement and accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces user-centered design considerations for AR in physical therapy, based on interviews with patients, to improve in-home injury recovery exercises.

Findings

Identified key challenges faced by patients during in-home PT

Proposed design variables for body-based visualizations in AR

Provided insights for future AR applications in injury recovery

Abstract

Physical therapy (PT) plays a crucial role in muscle injury recovery, but people struggle to adhere to and perform PT exercises correctly from home. To support challenges faced with in-home PT, augmented reality (AR) holds promise in enhancing patient's engagement and accuracy through immersive interactive visualizations. However, effectively leveraging AR requires a better understanding of patient needs during injury recovery. Through interviews with six individuals undergoing physical therapy, this paper introduces user-centered design considerations integrating AR and body motion data to enhance in-home PT for injury recovery. Our findings identify key challenges and propose design variables for future body-based visualizations of body motion data for PT.