Personas

Physical therapists are all specially trained at examining a patient from a physical viewpoint and determining how to regain the patient's physical capabilities. Physical therapists can both record and interpret information, and can be separated into two personas:

Fred is a technology-oriented physical therapist who will easily adapt to new technology and new software environments either through physically engaging in the software or by a quick tutorial. He will quickly learn many of the software's features and will be able to intuitively know if something is not working correctly.

Jim is a non-technology-oriented physical therapist who has not always relied on computers for his daily work life. The learning curve will be steeper for Jim, and he will tend to require step-by-step instructions on how to operate the software's features. Fred is less accepting of the software and will take longer to become accustomed to the interface and utilizing it during sessions.

 

Use Cases

The physical therapist will be using the interface to log information about patients and control certain treadmill parameters during physical therapy sessions.

Physical therapist starts a session

• The therapist is presented with a GUI that allows them to enter metadata about the session: patient name, date/time of session, patient height, patient’s parietic side, and name of the file to save this information.
• Therapist also has option to load values from previous saved session data (see third screen use case).
• Error handling: ensure that values are in acceptable ranges and that filename is allowed and/or doesn't already exist.

Physical therapist sets the virtual environment

• Therapist specifies virtual environment setup variables: the environment to load and the eyeball height of the patient.

Physical therapist begins running a therapy session

• Therapist specifies values for initial treadmill setting.
• Therapist also has ability to save all current GUI values for this screen, for easy loading later.
• Therapist has the ability to begin a new mini-session, which is a subdivision of the physical therapy session in order to allow rest and recovery between the many mini-sessions that make up one entire physical therapy session.
• Therapist can also view real-time data for total elapsed time walking during the mini-session, total number of steps, and elapsed distance walked.
• Error handling: ensure that values are in acceptable ranges.

Physical therapist wants to change the logging settings

• Therapist can enable/disable logging and set the log file name.
• Error handling: ensure that filename is allowed and/or doesn't already exist.

 

Requirements

Create a user interface that will allow physical therapists to set or change any of the following:

Meta Data

• Patient name
• Date and time session starts
• Patient height
• Parietic side
• Other patient information
• Set session filename

Virtual Envrionment Setup

• Select environment file
• Write name of environment file
• Eye height

Treadmill Control

• Current belt speed (left and right)
• Current virtual locomotion speed
• Current curvature
• Max speed
• Curvature multiplier
• Optical flow multiplier
• User speed control ON/OFF
• Curvature ON/OFF
• Curvature control method
• Kalman filter parameters
• Kalman estimated error

Session Control

• User is walking
• Total elapsed walking time
• Elapsed walking time for mini-session
• Begin next mini-session
• Elapsed distance
• Number of strides

Logs

• Log name
• Enable/disable logging

Other

• Save to file
• Load values from file

 

Interfaces

Session Metadata and System Calibration

At the beginning of each session, the physical therapist will be asked to enter some information about the patient (name, height, etc) and the session. These values will be used to calibrate the virtual environment and to set up logging.

Real-time Feedback

The control interface will keep track of and update, in a predefined interval, various statistical data about the session and the patient's performance.

System Parameter Adjustment

The physical therapist will have the ability to toggle and adjust parameters that affect the treadmill system's behavior.

Interface Samples