Digital physiotherapy is exercise therapy for back, neck and joint pain, given through a phone app, with a physical therapist who guides the patient from a distance. It is also called virtual physical therapy, or digital musculoskeletal (MSK) care. Musculoskeletal means the muscles, bones and joints. The largest programmes are in the United States, where employers buy them for their staff.
Back and joint pain is one of the most common chronic conditions, and one of the most expensive for American employers. Many people with back pain end up with scans, injections or even surgery. Exercise therapy helps many of them. But few people finish a full course of visits to a physiotherapist's clinic, because each visit costs time and money.
Consider a warehouse worker in Ohio, in the United States, with low back pain that has lasted four months. His employer offers the programme as part of the staff's health benefits. He joins through the app, which asks about his pain and his work. A licensed physical therapist then sets him a plan of exercises, about 15 minutes a day. While he exercises, motion sensors strapped to his leg and back, or the phone's camera, track how far he bends and turns. The app shows him on screen whether he is doing each movement correctly. Every week, he scores his pain from 0 to 10. The therapist reads these scores and his movement data, changes the plan, and answers his questions by chat or video call. After twelve weeks, his pain score has fallen from 7 to 3.
The employer pays the programme company, usually only for staff who actually join and use it. Staff find and join the programme through the employer's benefits administration software. Some employers buy it through a value-based plan, a health plan that is paid for keeping staff healthy rather than for each treatment given. The programme reports pain scores and the number of people who avoided surgery, so the employer can judge whether it saved money.
How is this different from rehabilitation robotics? A rehabilitation robot is a machine in a hospital or clinic that moves the patient's arm or leg, for example after a stroke. Digital physiotherapy needs no machine. The patient does the exercises alone, at home, and the app and the therapist check them.