meet span
An ambient and supportive physical therapy tool that helps those with chronic mobility issues stay on track.
Span is an alternative take on physical therapy that attempts to incentivize users through ambient interactions. Through rapid ideation, iteration, and participant-research, Span became an unabashedly physical, tactile device. The magnetic mounting system offers an intuitive way to stop and start tracking. The LED lighting array makes it easy to track performance from a month down to a single rep. And the pivoting and detachable angle base makes Span visible where-ever you like. Span is the ambient, functional, and emotive bridge between you and your PT regimen.
Ideation built around the Physical Therapist’s experience
CHRIS TITCOMB — PERSONAL BEST PHYSICAL THERAPY
From the outset, this project was established around both the patient’s needs and the constraints of physical therapy practices. After talking with physical therapists directly, it became clear that adherence is a primary challenge, particularly in the remote, Telehealth era. Roughly one-third of physical therapy patients with regimens have to contend with their mobility issue in perpetuity — for these people, in particular it’s important to have an at-home solution.
“My patients are tasked with building incentive for themselves, it’s really important and really hard for some.”
Ideation
Designing the Participant Research
Before trying to design the final product, designing a user-experience and validation device was an important step. A low-fidelity Arduino-based sensor suite was built to give to people to test. This UVT featured a bunch of sensory feedback loops including a light array and a beeper that gave participants live feedback. It became clear that a majority of users didn’t want to have to rely solely on looking at a rep range or streak to know their performance.
A Physical Interface
Before a PT Session, Span will sense your presence and display an ambient flow of colors from the outer ring. The gradated colors convey your weekly performance.
Once the sensor is removed from the hub, Span begins to display live sensor data in the outer ring, and set/rep ranges in the inner ring. As you complete your session, Span flashes in celebration.
Once the sensor is re-docked to the hub, Span displays your weekly/monthly streak in the inner ring, and the flowing color in the outer ring conveys our updated average performance on a certain metric, like range of motion.
KEYFRAME № 1
KEYFRAME № 2
KEYFRAME № 3
The Span interface relies on three main components to track user input and display information: the sensor switch, the inner ring, and the outer ring. These three components allow for an intuitive way to track information before, during, and after an at-home PT session.
Surfacing, CAD, and CAM
late cad models
FDM PROTOTYPE
ABS DESIGN/ENGINEERING VALIDATION TEST
Construction
Multimodal Tracking System
Design through Iteration
Technical iteration really elevated this project, through several top-to-bottom revisions, EVTs, and DVTs Span became a product that is unabashedly physical.
AN early prototype
In–Use
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I optimized user experience through several rounds of in-person and at-home testing. By testing with real people suffering from mobility issues, both the design and engineering teams got the benefits and optimized the interface and technical works-like model.
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orienting design around user experience and user delight — from GUIs to Coffee-makers
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from arduino to CAM to mechanical engineering it’s always rewarding to implement new and exploratory hard skills