Vibrotactile Feedback Strategies for Trunk-Stabilizing Exercises in a Home-Based Scenario: Qualitative Interview...

Area of Science:

• Rehabilitation Engineering
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Physical Therapy

Background:

• Home-based physiotherapy exercises present challenges in providing effective patient movement feedback.
• Developing implementable strategies to gather end-user feedback requirements is crucial for effective rehabilitation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To derive requirements for a vibrotactile feedback strategy for wearable devices used in physiotherapy home exercises.
• To integrate principles of feedback design from instructional psychology and incorporate physiotherapist expertise.

Main Methods:

• Observation of 9 physical therapists' feedback behavior during staged training.
• Guided interviews to gather recommendations for a vibrotactile feedback system.
• Analysis of observational and interview data using a combined deductive and inductive approach.

Main Results:

• Therapists provided feedback on 57.3% of movement repetitions, with 50.2% of feedback content detailing correct execution.
• Auditory feedback was most common (51.9%), often concurrent with the task.
• Interview data suggested a need for reduced feedback frequency and supported multimodal and differentiated feedback content.

Conclusions:

• Key feedback characteristics identified include reduced frequency, differentiated content, multimodal delivery, and trunk-proximal vibrotactile cues.
• These findings offer insights for designing effective vibrotactile feedback strategies for physiotherapy home exercises.
• Further hypotheses-driven research and patient studies are recommended to validate these approaches.