Physical therapy (PT)—the fifth largest clinical health occupation requiring a license, according to a 2023 report by the American Physical Therapy Association—is tapping further into tech innovations.
Physical therapists use activities to help patients improve motor skills and brain function. The increased use of artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, wearables, apps, and telehealth have all fueled advances in how PT is administered and how movement data can be captured, used, or shared. Market researcher Research and Markets projects the global PT software market will expand from $24.56 billion in 2023 to $34.87 billion by 2028.
“We’re going to continue to see how can AI and how can machine learning help with diagnosis…with doing tasks like checking in patients and…help surgeons read range of motion,” Jessica Wulke, a physical therapy and the clinical solutions implementation manager at health tech company Academy Medtech Ventures (AMV), told Healthcare Brew.
Wearables like Oura Rings and Apple Watches can also play a big role for monitoring personal health, she added. For example, they can track sleep, which correlates with mental fatigue and can be a factor in increasing risk of injury.
The athlete treatment
Wulke has been a physical therapist for 14 years, mostly working with professional athletes like the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and NFL players in the offseason.
According to Wulke, the NFL has its own insurance policy, but the league also employs team doctors, including clinicians and physical therapists, and partners with healthcare organizations to offer benefits. However, if players prefer, they can also set up a “single-case agreement” with specific providers or private doctors, she said.
With so many moving parts, technology helps everyone get on the same page.
Wulke mainly uses tools from performance tech companies VALD and AMV, which NFL teams use, she said, making it easier to evaluate athletes in the same way year-round.
VALD, founded in 2015, has an ecosystem of eight technology products and contracts with military groups including the US Space Force and professional and collegiate sports teams, Anthony Sinacore, director of North America sales at VALD, told Healthcare Brew. The company uses feedback from clients to inform what products the company develops or acquires next, he said. VALD’s systems, he added, look at things like muscle force, acceleration, deceleration, change of direction, and joint angles during various movements—all information that is then stored in its exercise prescription platform.
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This tech is designed to replace previous, more subjective measures of strength, such as doctors judging how hard players are pressing down on their arms. “It’s quantifying a part of their body that otherwise has really been an untapped metric,” Sinacore said. “Not only can I track [data] to see where [players] are comparative to other members of their team…but also to see how we can say, ‘Is our strength program working? Is our rehab program working?’”
AMV offers tools like MovePT, which uses computer vision to analyze physical movement and measure range of motion.
These types of PT technology could contribute to future research by allowing teams to track performance data at an individual, group, or positional level during preseason, regular season, and postseason from year to year “to really provide more fundamental insights of how everything is going, whether it’s an injury risk, performance improvement, strength gain, strength losses,” Sinacore said. “This data gives [teams] the ability to start asking better questions.”
Head in the game
And tech doesn’t just help these PT patients regain physical strength. In 2016, researchers from the University of Florida and the University of Virginia noted a correlation between mental fatigue and risk of injury. Cognitive exercises, Wulke said, can help condition athletes mentally and simulate the type of fatigue they might feel in both their muscles and their brains during the third or fourth quarter of a game.
AMV’s CogPT, an iPad-based neurocognitive training and assessment program, can test athletes’ ability to dual task or perform under fatigue, and Wulke said she can use the tool to measure how reaction times change in response to cognitive fatigue exercises, like color-number association or variations of the Stroop task.
Cognition training—like warming up the brain, keeping it active during sessions, and building up resilience to stress—has been a big focus in her practice this year. Integrating cognition tasks into PT could potentially be useful to a variety of patients beyond the NFL, she said.
“Pulling in cognition has been huge for me,” Wulke added, “and I think that we’re starting to see more and more of people realizing how important that is.”