Tags
Due to COVID-19 pandemic, people are recommended to reduce social contact. Adults are asked to work from home, students are forced to study at home and patients prefer to rehabilitate at home!
From Home Office to Home Gym
The global lockdown forces many workers to work from home and to practice social distancing. People around the globe keep in touch using FaceTime, Zoom and Team. At the same time, the lockdown prevents many people from attending gyms while the pandemic reminds us to be more health conscious. Fortunately, a Hong Kong start-up Eggplant Technology with IoT products branded under Move-It brings the gym experience to home using apps and IoT devices like smart dumbbells and some other smart workout equipment. These devices measure the user movements so that the users can receive immediate feedback from live coaches anywhere in the world. All the data collected by the devices can help coaches monitor the progress of a user. With the advent of AR/VR, we believed that the home gym experience will become closer and closer to the real thing.
From Home Gym to Home Rehabilitation
Dumbbells are prevalently used in physiotherapy to help prevent injuries or in adding in the rehabilitation of an injury (Cornell, 2020). Dumbbells can target specific muscles in ligaments in abdomen, shoulder, chest and arm etc. Patients can use different weights of dumbbells (from low to high) to perform a proper form of exercise taught by physiotherapists, targeting the specific muscles in need of strengthening. Evidence suggested that exercising for 20-45 minutes, 3-4 times per week are effective on muscle strength, balance and frailty (Hartmann-Boyce, Davies, Frost, Bussey 2020).
This can reduce the service availability of some rehabilitation services such as Physiotherapy and Occupational Therapy, furthermore, it might not be feasible for some patient to access their rehabilitation program in hospitals. Using Smart Dumbbell as an interactive workout device may allow physiotherapy, occupational therapy patients to perform rehabilitation exercises at home. This can reduce the social contact of patients from going out to hospitals for rehabilitation programmes and reduce the risk of infection.
Move-It Smart Solutions
Move-It Smart Dumbbell can be designed to sense and record a large variety of body movements. The duration, stability, accuracy and heartbeat will also be recorded while patients are doing their rehabilitation exercise. Exercise designed by health professionals can be pre-recorded in the Smart Dumbbell application and assign to patients daily according to their individual needs.