Video Exercises & Collaboration

Some exercises are really simple for patients to understand and providing VHI printed instructions is sufficient.  However, I find more complex exercises very difficult for patients to retain after leaving the clinic as they show me incorrect demonstrations on the next visit.  Strategies I've used is asking how the patient wants the instructions written down so they can remember their way.

I've tinkered with the idea of just video recording what I would like them to do so they can refer to that visual feedback to help with learning.  Today, it is still hard to share video of patients as file sizes are large and cannot be emailed easily.  Although most patients have an email address, having them sign up for video sharing services can be a hassle in order for them to see videos.  Providing them with a flash drive of their exercises can be difficult as they can be easily lost or not work correctly with the patient's computer.  At our pro bono clinic at UND, my partner and I decided to utilize Dropbox in order to share videos of our client performing exercises.  We could easily record a video with a tablet or smartphone and upload it directly to Dropbox.  Sharing on Dropbox is a breeze and only people with the URL it provides have access to the video.  We also used goo.gl to shorten the URL to make it typing it in the patients home device much more simple.  The beautiful thing about Dropbox is videos play nicely within a browser without having to download any files and works nicely on most smart phone devices.

There are other services such as Google Drive and Box that are capable of easy cloud sharing, but I'm sure you have heard all the hacking that has been going on in the news recently.  Also these services have risks for not complying with HIPAA currently as discussed on this website.  I plan on further discussing drawbacks such as HIPAA and data theft in a future post.

Although these may not be ideally used in the clinic for patients, I have found these to be marvelous for collaborating with classmates and colleagues.  We can share files, modify them, and see previous versions of files which was super helpful especially for group presentations.  Plus if you have the service installed on your computer, anything you edit within the service folder changes automatically online for everyone.  Using Google Drive had other services too such as Google Hangouts.  We could all simultaneously video chat for free and share real time of our computer monitor screen.  The beautiful thing about Google services is it can all be done from a browser without having to download and install any software (although these do work best using Google Chrome).  FaceTime and Skype are other video chatting alternatives.

Other Exercise/HEP Services (I also plan on comparing these services more later on):

• You could simply record a patient with your phone/tablet camera and email it to them
• WebExercises
• Physiotec
• Perfect Fit
• HEP2go - HEP2go has been a very awesome service I have been using on my 3rd clinical set I will be discussing more in the future due to how versatile it is for being a free service.

All the videos you record can be referred back to in order to assess if patients have improved and they love to see that they have made improvements as well.