Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the largest cause of physical disability in youth. Physical Therapy (PT) is a mainstay of care for patients with CP and helps reduce their level of disability over time (i.e. contractures, mobility, and need for orthopedic procedures). While PT has been shown to improve performance, access to high quality, personalized care is limited by many factors including cost, insurance coverage, physical location, time commitment and access to trained therapists. The Sports Institute at UW Medicine has developed a cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant software platform (ExerciseRx), that allows the tracking of physical activity using sonar and other sensors in modern mobile phones. Using the patient’s cellphone, we can create patient-specific training regimens that are tailored to individual patient’s needs. The regimens are prescribed by their physician/therapists and the program uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to construct detailed, custom and progressive activity plans that are tied to physician derived outcome goals. With generous support from Seattle Children’s Research Institute, The Sports Institute will leverage the existing ExerciseRx platform to develop a mobile exercise regimen – ExerciseRx-CP -- that can be performed daily by adolescents with CP in the home environment. The first phase of research will utilize qualitative interviews to inform the design and functionality of the ExerciseRx-CP digital interface as well as assess the overall concept of home-based PT from the perspective of providers and patients and families impacted by CP. The second phase of research will focus on piloting ExerciseRx-CP with a small subset of adolescent patients to assess feasibility and usability.
Seattle Children’s Research Institute