Phystec’s activity board improves post-surgical rehabilitation

The new SmiLe company Phystec is developing an “Activity Board,” a digital assistive device that improves rehabilitation for patients who had surgery. The Activity Board, which is based on visualization of prescribed exercises, enables patients to participate in their own care, thereby facilitating increased mobility, faster recovery and shorter length of stay in the hospital.

Early mobilization and exercise after surgery are crucial for reducing both postoperative complications and hospital length of stay.

The challenge is that in many cases, the prescribed exercises are not entered in the patient chart, causing confusion for both patient and staff regarding the extent to which these orders are actually followed.

One solution for this dilemma is the Activity Board, which clearly visualizes the individual exercise schedule prescribed by the physical therapist for the patient. By placing the Activity Board at the patient’s bedside, staff and patients can easily follow up at any time of day to ensure that all exercises were carried out, including on weekends and holidays when the physical therapist is not always available. The Activity Board is also appropriate for patients with other medical problems, as well as for residents of assisted living facilities who are receiving care, or individuals who live at home and are undergoing rehabilitation with the assistance of home help services.

An analog version of the Activity Board was designed eight years ago and is currently used in several hospitals in Sweden and Denmark. Its positive effects were documented in a study conducted on patients with abdominal cancer at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm. According to study, the degree of mobilization increased by a striking 300 percent, while reducing length of stay for patients who used the Activity Board compared with patients who received customary treatment.

The digital version of the Activity Board was developed in collaboration with LU Innovation and offers an array of new and improved features that make it easier to enter the exercise schedule, display more orders, manage and save information, as well as other tasks.

“We are extremely pleased that we are now members of SmiLe. We have already seen what a difference the Activity Board makes for patients, but we need to benefit from SmiLe’s extensive expertise in several areas to be able to take the next step in our development and enter the market,” says Ingela Sjölin, CEO of Phystec.

“We would like to warmly welcome Phystec to SmiLe. They have developed a fundamentally simple yet innovative product that has already proven to be highly beneficial and we look forward to helping them to further develop as a company and opening doors to our large life science network,” says Ebba Fåhraeus, CEO of SmiLe Incubator.

 

For more information, please contact: Ingela Sjölin, CEO of Phystec, info@phystec.se, +46 (0)70-354 50 93

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