The Importance of home training as part of the rehabilitation process
Noa Russo Ayash, B.Sc.PT – Physical Therapy Field Expert
A well-fitting exercise program is developed by the PT for each patient who enters a physiotherapy clinic.
As we already know, the exercises are used as a tool for recovery as they increase the patient's body strength, elasticity, balanced and endurance resulting with recovery in a shorter time span and with higher success.
Giving a tailor-made exercise program, taking into account a patient's problems and his physical situation, is one of the underpinning stones of the physical therapy field.
When giving an exercise program, the physical therapist has to provide two types of programs, one to be performed at the clinic and one for home practice.
For home practice, the PT has to choose exercises that will fit the practice space, will not include practice instruments and will be safe for the patient. Another thing to be consider is objects that every house contains, and can interfere or become a risk for the patient while practicing. A good example is a carpet.
A home exercise program is very important to the rehabilitation program! Because Average patients come to physical therapy treatments twice a week or less. It is already known that for the improvement of body physical functionality, it is necessary to practice at list 4-5 times a week. Home practice is the only available solution. There are many researches that documented the effectiveness of home exercise.
McKenzie, one of the manual therapy founders, based most of his treatment methods on home training. His rational was that every one of us, repeats the same movements thousands of times a day and in order to fix a problem, we need to do the opposite movement in a significant way. This is where home training is the solution.
But, there are some difficulties when using home based exercise programs. For start, the patient has to remember the exercises and how to do them correctly and accurately. Otherwise he may harm himself. Second, he has to actually perform it, even if he is busy or in pain (this is the main reason why home exercises are not very effective today). Third, the PT does not get accurate feedback on how the patient actually exercised and what was his real progress.
Here, in BioGaming, we thought about how to make home exercises safe, actually performed and with real and accurate feedback to the PT.
Yugo, BioGamings’ game based exercise platform enables patients to execute PT defined exercise programs in a Kinect based game which is safe, fun and provides accurate feedback to the PT. In addition, the patient receives real time feedback on his accomplishments and enjoys his exercises.
For more information visit – www.biogaming.com