We spread out this week continuing our interview process, looking into competitors, and started combing the literature.
For starters we looked through our interviews and picked out the seven recurring reasons for why people fail to adhere to their at home exercises.
fear of pain
fear of causing damage
the exercises are boring
pain while or following performing the exercises
busy daily schedule
belief that the at home exercises are pointless.
lack of communication/bad dynamic with the physical therapist.
In an effort to understand which reasons are highest priority we developed a card sorting survey to help people prioritize or add reasons.
We are still collecting results.
Additionally, we specified the terminology of our topic: patient compliance/adherence in home exercise programs. Our goal is to take this technical challenge and address it on the human level, how do we help people build a training habit.
This clarification of terminology allowed us to start screening literature on the topic. We discovered that the main reasons we picked from the interviews were actually heavily backed by the literature, Bollen et al (2014), and this gave us an opportunity to start researching these reasons more in depth.
Finally we used this terminology and literature to do our market research. We found a variety of competitors that used gamification, gesture bands for biofeedback, simple pen, paper and conversation, and 3D animations and videos. We split these competitors by technological: analog and therapist involved: therapist free.
