A doctor has teamed up with a physiotherapist to develop a free app that allows physios to remotely monitor the progress of musculoskeletal patients.
Fatimah Parkar and Rahul Kanegaonkar show how to track activity levels while exercising
Rahul Kanegaonkar, a consultant surgeon at Medway NHS Trust and president of the British Balance Network, has been working on the remote monitoring system with Fatimah Parkar, a specialist physiotherapist at the Spire Alexandra Hospital in Chatham, Kent.
Ms Parkar has been trialling the app with her patients since September and believes the system could help to improve exercise compliance and lead to better outcomes.
She told Frontline: ‘I speak with patients about it and if they are happy to use it they download it for free. Then, while they are exercising they wear their phone and the app tracks their activity levels.
‘I can then remotely check if they have done their exercises, and can see if they’ve been compliant or not.
‘And if they aren’t complying I can message them via the app and say “Your strength is very poor. You need to improve, so please exercise”.’
The app displays information in the form of a graph and, so far, Ms Parkar has used it to monitor the progress of two post-operative shoulder patients and a patient with a radial head fracture.
The D+R Therapy app is currently only available for iPhones and can be downloaded for free at iTunes
Number of subscribers: 0
Log in to comment and read comments that have been added