"Patience" was a proof-of-concept web-based smartphone application designed as a tool for improving the process of physical therapy. By accessing the smartphone’s accelerometer, "Patience" provided a user and therapist with real-time visual and audio feedback to assess the quality of exercise and motion.

A major issue for physical and occupational therapists is that both they and their clients lack any sort of realtime feedback on the quality of a client’s exercise performance. Also, therapists tend to multi-task while treating clients and can not always properly monitor the quality of a patient's exercise. On the reverse side, clients could benefit from more reliable immediate feedback on their activities. "Patience" was designed as an affordable and accesible solution to this problem.

The application was designed for use with a physical therapist who would record initial baseline values for the appropriate movement of a patient’s arm. A user would then insert the smartphone device into an armband harness. Since the phone would rest on a user’s arm, the application was designed with oversized buttons for accessibility. When a patient began the exercise, the app would record the device’s accelerometer values and immediately plot the user’s movement values on a visual graph in a separate web browser window. Audio signals would also emit directly from the phone if a user’s movement extended outside a predefined range.

The application leveraged node.js and web sockets to stream the data in realtime from the mobile device to the separate web page. The "Patience" Demo Site lived HERE and the companion Visualization Site lived HERE. They are no longer functional, but offer a glimpse into the design of the prototype. The project was created in collaboration with Bobby Genalo and Nathalie Be'er within John Schimmel's Assistive Technology class at ITP.