Physiotherapy Over a Distance: The Use of Wearable Technology for Video Consultations in Hospital Settings

Wearable technologies offer potential in supporting assessment of lower limb movements in video consultations, which otherwise are challenging to assess. Yet there remains a limited understanding of how such technologies can be used to improve video consultations in a hospital setting and how they contribute to the clinician-patient interactions over a distance. In this article, we report on the findings of the field evaluation of a wearable technology—SoPhy. SoPhy consists of a pair of sensor embedded socks that capture the lower limb movements of a patient and a web-interface to visualise these movements for the remote physiotherapist. Our study demonstrates that SoPhy helped the physiotherapist in identifying the subtle differences in patients’ movements across all six phases of a consultation. SoPhy increased the confidence of the physiotherapist and guided more accurate assessment of the patients. SoPhy visualisation enhanced the overall clinician-patient communication and offered a better understanding of the therapy goals to the patients. Using the characteristics of the visualisations, patients were able to plan specific goals. We discuss how SoPhy helped in addressing challenges in video consultations experienced by a physiotherapist, and beyond that, how it enabled collective reflection between therapist and patient.