Jose Ricardo Cuenca Enriquez, Ulises López Nava, Mario Alberto Martínez Camacho, Hector David Montoya Álvarez Tostado
Per the World Health Organization (WHO), the barriers faced by the 15% of the world’s population who live with disabilities include prohibitive costs, limited availability of services, physical barriers and inadequate skills and knowledge of health workers. A large portion of this population could benefit from the practice of physical therapy, which aims to develop, maintain and restore maximum movement and functional ability. Furthermore, physical therapy as a profession is expected to grow 34% from 2014 to 2024. The large increase in the demand of these services must be addressed, not only increasing the number of specialized workers, but special considerations must be taken into account to tackle the barriers outlined by the WHO.
Because of these currently unmet and growing needs, we propose a device to enhance physical therapy’s outcomes without requiring extra time from a supervising therapist. In fact, our proposal would reduce the need of face-to-face therapies, thus empowering people with disabilities to achieve better results at rehabilitation and freeing therapists’ time to attend to the ever-growing demand of their services. Our project consists of a home-care system capable of applying electrotherapy and heat therapy, per the supervising of subsequent exercises to assess correctness and completeness of the session, also allowing the therapist to remotely follow up on a patient’s recovery and needs. Such a device opens an affordable possibility to address currently unmet needs of physical therapy, and scale up as the needs of such a large population grow.