Biofeedback software for physiotherapy performance

The big win

Physiotherapy is an important tool for people recovering from injuries, treating health problems, or even seeking to improve performance in sports. Surprisingly, many methods of evaluating the patient’s condition or measuring their improvement still rely on the therapist’s observations or the patient’s guess.

The good news is that nowadays the old methods can be combined with high-tech solutions to achieve more accurate diagnoses and faster results in patient improvement.

In 2019, SoftDesign collaborated with Miotec to develop innovations in physical therapy and biofeedback. Miotec developed the hardware, including sensors for electromyography (EMG), which measures muscle activity, and fluxometry, which measures fluid flow, in this case for urine. SoftDesign developed the software part of this solution – the application that reads data from the sensors, processes it in real time, and displays information to the therapist and the patient.

The goal of this solution was to read thousands of data points per second from the sensors attached to the patient, convert them into useful indicators about muscle activity and urine flow, and display them to the patient with virtually no delay. The speed of processing and rendering was key to this solution, enabling a concept known as biofeedback – that is, the patient learning to better control or activate their muscles based on the results displayed in real time on the screen.

Biofeedback technology to support diagnosis and treatment

Technology has a major impact on health care that goes far beyond scheduling medical appointments or telemedicine consultations. Data can and should be used to support diagnosis and treatment.

The use of biofeedback technology is a proven therapeutic technique. The recovery or training process works like a game controlled by the patient through the sensors. People can work on improving their health by controlling certain bodily processes that normally occur involuntarily, including the activation and relaxation of muscles such as those in the perineum and others involved in bladder control.

With each new technological advance, biofeedback becomes more accessible and effective in helping ordinary people manage a variety of health conditions, from chronic pain to anxiety.

For Miotec, the technique is crucial and not only helps the therapists to better identify the patient’s condition and prescribe an efficient treatment. Patients accessed with the technique are relieved that they no longer have to undergo invasiv e and painful procedures to learn what to expect in terms of diagnosis and treatment.

Results

• Real impact on the diagnostic work of physiotherapists and urologists by avoiding invasive exams.
• Reduction of treatment time through the use of biofeedback.
• Portable software application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Easy and reliable connection to the sensor.
• Input of thousands of data points per second from patient-mounted sensors.
• Real-time conversion and visualization of sensor data into useful graphs and indicators.