Kaia Health, a digital musculoskeletal therapy platform equipped with computer vision technology, provides exercise corrections in real-time. The Kaia Health smartphone app uses the phone’s camera to monitor patients activity during therapeutic exercise. According to a clinical study, newly published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the app makes corrections with the same accuracy as a live, in-person physical therapist.
Health Tech Insider has followed Kaia Health’s digital therapy solutions since 2017, when we covered the introduction of its personalized, multimodal platform. In 2020, we reported on a German study that demonstrated the platform’s back pain app yielded better patient outcomes than conventional treatments. This latest trial evaluated the app’s performance while participants with hip and knee osteoarthritis performed a series of exercises. Human therapists simultaneously observed the exercise as the app made corrections to form and posture based on computer vision data analysis.
The human therapists agreed with Kaia Health’s automated, real-time suggestions as often as they agreed with each other’s corrections. However, these results aren’t proof that computerized therapy should completely replace live exercise sessions or eliminate the need for input from a human therapist. Kaia Health designed the exercise correction feature to complement virtual programs supervised by it s network of live physical therapists. The primary function of the automated guidance is to enhance the safety and benefits of daily therapeutic exercise practice.
Integrating highly accurate automated coaching with valuable person-to-person physical therapy shows that Kaia Health is committed to a well-rounded digital therapeutic treatments for patients with chronic pain. In the case of knee and hip osteoarthritis, Kaia Health has the potential to reduce dependence on prescription pain killers, help patients avoid joint replacement surgery, improve function, and enhance their quality of life.
