I’m curious about the background behind the development of Exercite Care

It started with ‘HowFit’, a home training service using AI object recognition technology. Howfit also won the grand prize as the ‘Self-Development Application that Shined the Year 2021’ selected by Google Play. Then, I started receiving calls from medical institutions. There are still unmet medical needs in the areas of orthopedics, rehabilitation medicine, and surgical patient care. With support from the Ministry of Science and ICT, we conducted joint research with medical institutions and developed exercise care. 

Why did medical institutions pay attention to Exercite Care?

Actually, I thought rehabilitation exercise would be different from regular exercise, but it wasn’t much different. However, what the doctors paid attention to was whether they prescribed exercise to patients and followed the exercise instructions until their next visit. In fact, if you visit the hospital every day after surgery and do rehabilitation exercises like professional athletes, you can measure how much you have improved through exercise, but this is not possible for all patients. Moreover, since patients living in rural areas sometimes follow up after a month, it is not easy to know exactly whether there is improvement. I think it is useful that patients can continue rehabilitation exercises at home through exercise care and that they can provide immediate feedback on the effects of exercise improvement 

What is different from the existing practice of prescribing rehabilitation exercises?

Typically, hospitals provide paper guides with exercise tips depending on the patient’s disease. Once the exercise therapist or physical therapist teaches you how to exercise, you can return home and exercise until the next treatment date. Recently, an increasing number of hospitals are providing instructions on exercise methods through videos on their YouTube channels. However, even with this method, it is impossible to know how much exercise the patients ultimately performed. Exercise care provides exercise coaching according to a doctor’s prescription. At this time, the number of times per set for each exercise and rest time can be specified in detail according to the patient’s condition to create a customized exercise routine. Information such as how much the patient’s shoulder angle is improving after exercise, how many times the exercise was done, and at what time was collected. This data is collected and sent back to the hospital app. Doctors can view the exercise progress of patients when they visit the hospital and use it for research. Currently, Sejong Hospital is using Exercise Care for exercise therapy for rehabilitation patients. 

The people who actually use Exercite Care are also doctors. Is there anything focused on when developing a solution?

Diagnosis, prescription, and research areas remain with doctors. If doctors use iPixel’s technology to prescribe and create their own treatments, you can think of us as a platform that provides that technology. Therefore, if we receive approval for a digital treatment device in the future, we plan to build a business model in the form of sharing revenue with hospitals.

The goal is to live a healthy life throughout the entire life cycle. What does it mean?

As we live, degeneration of the musculoskeletal system occurs. Then, when you get injured, you go to the hospital for treatment and surgery, but the physical therapy that can be done at the hospital is limited to this. In the case of our country, where there is no care sector, it is a situation where no one can take care of the child after that. For example, if you are a hip joint surgery patient, your prognosis may vary depending on whether you return home and continue rehabilitation exercises, but there is currently no such system in place. Rehabilitation exercise cannot be replaced by medication. I believe that digital healthcare is something that provides continuous motivation to exercise and helps people manage their health.