LusioMATE Helping Adults with Chronic Conditions
At Lusio Rehab we are supremely privileged to meet, interact and work with some amazing people; from clinicians, carers, parents, kids and others, like us, working in this space, there are so many people doing great things to help improve their own quality of life, or that of others.
Introducing Stephanie Potts
In this month’s Lusio Talks we particularly want to turn the spotlight on a clinician that we have got to know very well over the last few months. Stephanie Potts is a Physiotherapist, with 20 years experience specializing in neurological physiotherapy, and she has been a wonderful advocate for the benefits that LusioMATE can provide for her clients.
'Super' Bozena
We first worked with Stephanie when she introduced her client Bozena to LusioMATE in January 2020. Bozena, or Super Bozena as we like to call her, owing to her fantastic dedication to her therapy and her consistent extensive monthly usage of the LusioMATE platform, suffers from Myotonic Muscular Dystrophy. This causes her to feel a lot of weakness and fatigue but she loves exercise therapy and her husband Leszlek, and Stephanie thought that LusioMATE would be great for her. Leszlek was particularly attracted to the independent practice and the interesting feedback, via the dashboard, that the platform offered. He was particularly determined in troubleshooting to ensure that the platform worked for both here in Australia and in Poland where they spend a significant part of their lives. Since January 2020, when Bozena first started using LusioMATE, she has been consistently the highest user on the platform, often clocking up over 1000 minutes of game therapy time each month. This is what she had to say about Lusio recently:
‘I have been trying for years to find exergames that I could use in addition to physiotherapy. All of them were either too difficult to use or too boring or would require me to buy and setup expensive and bulky equipment. LusioMATE has addressed all these problems. I am now a happy and grateful daily user of LusioMATE. All I need is a simple tablet, with no SIM card, internet access, two Lusio sensors that I can attach to my body according to prescribed requirements, and here I go – anytime and anywhere in the world.’
Bozena's favourite Lusio game, Lusio Basketball.
Updates Aplenty
Since introducing Bozena to LusioMATE, Stephanie has workshopped and used LusioMATE with many of her clients at her clinic, NeuroActive Rehabilitation, in Sydney. The Lusio Team email inbox has been the welcome recipient of a number of brilliant short emails from Stephanie with an update as to how well a certain game had engaged a particular client, or another creative way that she had found to use the platform.
NeuroActive Rehabilitation specialises in providing evidence based, personalised physiotherapy for adults with neurological conditions, so as you can imagine when Stephanie contacts us to let us know that something we are doing is working with her clients we sit up and take notice. Frankly, it's as strong a validation for what we are doing as we can hope for.
Adult Players Loving Lusio
Right after the launch of recent games Lusio Endless Racer and Lusio Rolling Ball 3D, which the Lusio Games Team had worked on very hard, with a focus on creating depth, particularly for adult players, we received this from Steph:
‘Loving the adult friendly games and Lusio Endless Racer is a hit as it allows lots of gameplay despite mistakes and crashes. And one of my clients told me how engaged he was when playing the Lusio Rolling Ball 3D.’
We wrote a social media post at the time saying how when we hear the word ‘engaged’ it’s music to our ears. It’s like the holy grail of what we are trying to achieve with LusioMATE, with engagement leading to motivation and ultimately improved physical therapy and / or movement goal outcomes.
The Stephanie Potts Lusio Showreel
In fact, so impressed have we been by some of the great things that Stephanie has done with LusioMATE that we put together a short video showreel, which can be seen on the Lusio Rehab YouTube channel.
In it you will see her gamifying the infamous wobble board and workshopping how to use Lusio without attaching the sensors to the body. The latter came about from concerns expressed by her clients about the risks of sharing straps between users, particularly during the worst of the Covid lockdown. To do that she found an old sewing machine pedal, creatively putting it to work whilst playing Lusio Steel Man. She can also be seen workshopping very small hand open and close movements with Lusio Steel Man, and then taking that learning and applying it to great effect for another client of hers, Felix.
When sending through the video of Felix, she wrote:
‘I Just thought I'd share this skerrick of footage from a session this morning with Lusio. Meet Felix. He is competitive and loves games, especially Bridge, which he plays several times a week. Holding and manipulating the cards is a great way of keeping his right hand as strong and dexterous as possible, given his background of MS. Obviously all his Bridge is now being played on line and his right hand is missing out on action. Felix is enjoying the Lusio games such as Lusio Rolling Ball and Lusio Shape Changer. Thanks Lusio!'
No thanks Stephanie Potts! You have done wonderful things introducing the benefits of Lusio to adults with chronic conditions and the challenge is now very much ours as regards further developing engaging and targeted games and applications for this cohort of the population.
If you would like to contact Stephanie Potts you can do so via the link here.
