PROHAB Connected Healthcare Device

Physiotherapists and their patients involved in rehabilitation, lack usable real-time exercise data and guidance. There is a lack of measurement and feedback to both the user and medical practitioner. The effect of a long and arduous rehabilitation process, results in stagnation, uncertainty over improvement, patient disengagement, boredom and exercise non-compliance, resulting in patient and practitioner frustration. Current treatment: • Resistance-band exercises are commonly prescribed by practitioners • Small incremental increases in exercise loads are generally required • Exercise and Rehabilitation using resistance-bands, is based on guesswork • Guessing what exercises the patient performed previously, can also be troublesome • There is zero accuracy

PROHAB motivates patients recovering from injury, by seamlessly gathering exercise data and keeping track of real-time progress, assisting medical professionals to make better treatment recommendations. The device communicates rehabilitation data in real-time addressing: · Quantity – resistance and exercise volume. · Quality – type of contraction and control. Patients and athletes can now be guided through accurate and progressive exercises, resulting in more effective patient recovery outcomes or athlete training programs: · Improved motivation, communication and exercise compliance · Reduced pain · Faster recovery · Better informed practitioners making improved decisions, through the availability of objective health data · Happier, healthier lives

The user-centered, modular approach, opens-up new commercial opportunities to scale the PROHAB system into new rehabilitation markets. The system delivers a cost competitive insight into rehabilitation and physical performance. The combination of high-quality data with AI, offers PROHAB a significant competitive advantage. The life-cycle thinking design process which was applied, has resulted in a product/service combination that has increased product physical durability while minimising technological obsolescence, by applying regenerative design principles. PROHAB provides a range of intelligent rehabilitation, healthcare and exercise products and services, meeting the therapeutic, motivational and training needs of patients and athletes, improving community health outcomes.

GOOD DESIGN (IMAGE #2). We believe the entry represents an exemplary example of "Good User-Centred Design" practice, achieving an ideal combination of Usability, Feasibility and Viability, realising a unique value proposition for each of the product's major customer and user groups. DESIGN INNOVATION (IMAGE #3). We believe that the entry advances the design profession, by providing a highly successful illustration of trans-institutional engagement, linking Flinders University and the healthcare start-up PROHAB. It pushes the boundaries of new and innovative thinking in design practice, through the application of Design Thinking and the Understand, Explore, Materialise design-cycle. Early in the “empathy creation” phase of the project, the design team were told that it had to be able to quickly attach to and detach from cables and resistance bands (“connect and go in less than 5 seconds”). Considerable effort was therefore put into optimising the carabineer attachment mechanism. The device also uses NFC to pair automatically with the user’s smart device, to quickly present the user with standardised, quantifiable and accessible real-time data. The integral titanium serpentine spring and switch actuator are integrated into the titanium chassis, without compromising the mechanical integrity and accuracy of the strain sensor, greatly reducing the component count.