[MUSIC]
Currently I'm a physiotherapist working in a private clinic.
Seeing a variety of patients from your office workers through to your
recreational and elite athletes.
A substantial part of our physiotherapy practice is to deliver exercise and
advice.
However, the problem with this is due to poor adherence to exercise programs,
patients are not often compliant with the advice and exercises we give them.
So utilizing the MyPhysio app has numerous benefits to the patients,
particularly in regards to adherence to an exercise program.
So once they leave the clinic, they then get an email to their phone,
which has the exercise program which they can download either as a PDF or
access the app inside.
So then, once they get into the app they can view video demonstrations of each
exercise, but also a description of how to perform the exercise.
In addition to this,
we can provide customized instructions based on how the patient presents,
including things about not holding your breath during exercise.
An additional benefit to this is that the MyPhysio app comes with a whole lot of
educational material that you can use and
include in different patients' exercise programs.
So when the clinician's able to create the exercise program they're also able
to specify the number of reps, sets, rest time, and
number of days, that you're able to do the exercise.
And this makes it quite personalized to the individual presentation
of the patient.
It makes the patient feel as well like they're getting personalized exercise
advice over the usual recommendation of doing just three by ten reps of
an exercise.
In addition, the MyPhysio app tracks adherence to an exercise program.
So it also allows us to see how much they've been using the program.
It means that patients can't hide behind excuses about not using it.
>> An exampe telehealth project I like to talk about is my home dialysis
>> And this is for
renal patients who have dialysis machines at home to record the health data.
We currently have over 100 patients within two local health districts.
One is at Blacktown and the other is at Liverpool.
When we started we realized that many of all these patients
which have a chronic illness, we would regularly record the patient notes.
And these notes are not just one or two parameters, but they are quite detailed.
And what normally happens is they'll take these notes in their notebook.
And in a scheduled time, maybe every one month or
three months they will present this book to their doctor or to their nurse and
get treatment options and revisions.
When we approached this project, firstly,
it was a great opportunity to digitize this.
So that patients can simply use an app to actually provide their details.
And then once we realized it, the data capture wasn't the main point.
If the data that they were inputting could be seen in real time by their care staff,
a nurse or a doctor, they can actually intervene.
So we noticed even just a simple concept of recording things and
pushing this data in real time can have a tremendous impact to the patient.
And then, what the bigger impact that we found is that,
once we added a new function where the nurse or the caregiver can give feedback.
It's as simple as a tick to say I've read your dialysis session, or
that you are looking good.
Or sometimes we personalize depending on what sort of feedback's needed,
is creating a tremendous improvement to patients, compliance, and
their willingness to use the app.
And it's proven in theory that one of the biggest incentives to telehealth or
for any patient record data capture is continuous feedback.
And for them to feel reassured that they're looking after.
So, over three iterations we came up with an app for the patients,
which is very simple and something that they found very useful.
And then we've built up a dashboard for the nurse.
And for the dashboard, it's about efficiency and
how quickly they can go through all the patient data and identify important, or
patients that need their attention.
And then we also built up a viewer for the doctors.
So that when the patients go see the doctor they can actually see the whole
history in a digital, not just in numbers but in charts and in trends.
And not just in the last few months but their whole entire history.
Another advantage of an app like this is that as you put in your data it can do
error checking for you and it would also send alerts if something is not right.
And the moment that I insert my data, then it would be
pushed to a secure cloud server which can be then accessed by your care staff.
So this is the importance of real time monitoring because you don't need to wait
for the patient to come back to the clinic, but you can intervene.
>> The other research project that I have been involved with,
comes out of Singapore.
And I have a student there who has just completed her PhD.
And she's done this wonderful collaborative
interdisciplinary project with an iPad app which she's developed so
that people who have aphasia, which is a language problem that people
have typically after a stroke, but also after a brain injury.
30% of people after stroke have aphasia and
this means that they lose some or all of their language skills.
And therefore, they can't talk like we would in sentences,
they might only use words or phrases or have no language at all.
And what this app does is, in a way for
these people Skype isn't much use because they can't talk.
So they need other resources to help communicate, and that may include being
able to write something down, or being able to gesture like I'm doing, or
to be able to write the first letter of a word.
What this student Emily Guo did, was develop a multi-modal app.
So that the person with aphasia could either, they've got a video screen,
but they've also got a white board that they can write on.
And then we've also got a custom designed section
to present assessment materials remotely.
So that people can do naming tasks, for example, or
they can indicate whether they're feeling depressed or not on a five point scale.
Or they can indicate how happy they are with their life at the moment and
their life satisfaction.
So it's been a bit of a breakthrough having this multi-modal app.
And Emily has done some lovely work investigating whether it's a feasible