Inspiration
Every year, 50% of Americans develop injuries that require physical therapy but fail to utilize existing services. That’s 108 million people. Even more staggering is the fact that 30% of physical therapy patients do not fully attend their recommended plan of care for said physical therapy. Many people often learn what exercises they ought to do and fail to correctly follow through with them in a timely fashion, which could lead to injuries taking more time to heal or not healing properly.
We aim to help with this problem with our solution we developed called the MyoPT. MyoPT would work as an at-home physical therapy device that helps patients conduct physical therapy exercises by making sure that they are not over-exerting themselves or wrongly doing the exercises.
What it does
The device works by putting the Myo Armband around your arm. Relax your arm along the side of your body, and once you pull up the website, click the “Calibrate” button to start. As you move your arm and complete the exercise, a gif of Michael Scott should appear if you perform the exercise incorrectly while a picture of Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99 giving you a thumbs up will appear if you are doing the exercise correctly.
How we built it
We utilized the Myo Armband, which measures gestures and detects motion using a series of EMG (electromyography) muscle sensors. The data collected from the Armband is sent via WebSocket connection to our application, which parses the data and calculates the user’s arm motions to determine whether the they are within an approved limit for the physical therapy exercise at hand.
We use the ongoing recorded data that the Myo Armband collects, and use it to determine whether you are doing the physical therapy correctly.
This technology could be marketed towards physical therapists as well as consumers. Additionally, this technology could be used for people with various types of physical therapy issues, not just arm or shoulder or hand problems. It could be expanded to other ligaments such as the legs as well.
Challenges we ran into
Determining a problem and finding a solution. Extracting data from the MYO Armband.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Reading data and sending it to our algorithm to be processed.
What we learned
How to use the MYO Armband and more about IoT.
What's next for MyoPT
In the future, we will work to make the boundaries for the exercises more precise and accurate while also adding in more physical therapy exercises.
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