Personal experience
It all started with one of my teammates, Carl’s bad personal knee rehabilitation experience.
In the US alone, more than 600,000 knee replacement surgeries are performed per year, with figures on the rise.
Why this topic
Big numbers
Market
There is no well-known products in their maturity stage in the market.
In order to understand user's pain points concerning the rehabilitation process, we conducted user interviews, customer journey analysis, expert interviews and survey.
2.1
User interview
"It's really painful when you first started to the exercise." -- Carl
"You can't actually wear anything or use anything to help you feel
relieved in this process" -- Chen Li
"I watched Netflix when I was doing the exercise." -- Andrew
"I watched some Youtube tutorials online but they can't tell exactly whether you are doing it right." -- Mary & Andrew
"Sometime I just felt that this exercise was too hard for me in that rehab stage but I don't know which one is more suitable for my stage."
I talked with 3 people about their stories of doing knee rehabilitation.
Chen Li, 54. 3 months rehabilitation.
Andrew, 28. <1 months rehabilitation.
Mary Lin, 37. 3 months rehabilitation.
2.2
User Journey Map
2.3
Survey
2.4
Expert interview
-Knee rehabilitation can take a long time, knee replacement surgery needs
2-3 months whereas ACL(anterior cruciate ligament) needs 6-9 months
-Icing is necessary in some cases. Regularly patients need to ice 2-3 times
daily after some exercises to alleviate pain and inflammation. However,
there is no certain numbers for how many minutes...
-Progress can be determined partially by the increase of rehabilitation
exercise intensity
-In clinic, progression is approximated currently using thigh radius increase.
-Useful measurements: leg angle, straighten resistance, EMG(Electromyography).
-There is no mature products in the market.
We talked with a physical therapist Rachel to understand what a standard rehabilitation process is. In addition, we want to validate our pain points once more.
2.5
Secondary Research
