Getting Specific

This week we got specific and focused our need and goal. Initially statements by the patients interviewed highlighted lack of indicators of improvement, lack of communication between the physical therapist and patients, lack of motivation, confusion or pain. However, we realized these elements are actually variables; causes and symptoms of the need, not multiple needs as we thought before.  

We took a step back and refined the need: Patients struggle to develop effective home training habits which are critical to an efficient recovery and maintenance of pain associated with the injury overtime. 

This led us to focus our goal:How might we encourage physical therapy patients to develop self training habits outside of the clinic. 

In general this means our mission is to help people change behavior. We looked at this new need, scanned over the comments from the interviews, and found directions to explore. Changing behavior especially compliance with medical care is an incredibly difficult and complex field and the question is how do we go about this. Do we create incentives, or use social reinforcement/accountability to produce motivation? Do we create a scheduling or a goal setting tool? Do we gameify the exercise? Do we target acceptance and cognitions around pain? Do we increase feedback between patient and physical therapist? 

Along with looking into these questions, our interviews with physical therapists also pointed us to look at existing attempts to solve this problem. These existing solutions are what we plan to examine next.