Hotter 5: Our Favorite PT & SLP Apps

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Hey, Will, check this out.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: O… M… G…

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: This is the H(OT) 5.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Really?

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Yeah, it’s on FOX’s IGTV.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Wow, that’s pretty good.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Yeah, we can do one of these things.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Yeah, I mean it would be much better.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: It probably would. What can we do it on?

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: I mean, we’re both on our phones. How about apps apps?

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Apps? Yeah, absolutely. I use apps.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Yeah.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Hi, guys. Welcome. I’m Jonross Neptune, the director of SLP clinical services here with FOX Rehab, and I’m joined here by Dr. William Dieter, the director of PT clinical services here with FOX.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us for a Hotter 5, and we’re going to spend a few minutes talking about phone applications. And before we even get into it, just a little disclaimer: We’re going to talk about some apps that we’ve used in the past and seen people use, but we’re not necessarily attesting to the validity and rigor of them. But we did think it would be good to go over a couple of different options for treating clinicians to help make their lives a little bit easier and enhance their therapy.

So I think the first one, as a PT, that jumps out to me — there’s a couple of them — and it’s related to measuring range of motion, which is important. And there’s two different ones. The first one is called Goniometer. So it looks exactly like that. You’re using the accelerometer in the phone, and it looks exactly like your plastic goniometer. You put it on the body part. You press the button and it gives you the the measurement. Very easy — you just don’t have to carry it around with you anymore.

The other one is what’s called tilt meter. So it looks like this, and it would really be used for, you know, different types of range of motion for like lumbar, spine, and things you are not going to use a traditional goniometer — same thing accelerometer. That way I can y do it on my phone. I don’t have to carry things around.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Yeah, those are cool. When I think of therapy apps, I automatically assume speech therapy apps. I think it was kind of an easy transition for SLPs dealing with communication and things like that as this is the way people communicate these days — that you know some of those apps were related to speech-language pathology.

The one that I know I thought of immediately when we were approached about this was the small talk and there’s multiple smalltalk apps that Lingraphica it puts out. Lingraphica is a pretty large company that supplies individuals with high-tech augmentative communication devices. But these apps that they have, they are free apps, and they give people the ability to communicate on the go quickly with basic things. This first one I pulled up is related to daily activities. And it gives them the ability to say things like, “I’m thirsty.” “I’m hot.” “I’m cold.” “I need to use the restroom.” “I’d like to take a nap,” things like that, that they would need to do their everyday activities.

The other couple of ones that are on here are common phrases and conversation. So the common phrases are things that would help that person be involved and engaged in just small talk with people around their senior living community or in their home. And the conversation app allows them to engage more in conversation with someone else. So they may ask open-ended questions to someone that enters their room such as, you know, “what have you been doing today,” or, “what have you been up to lately,” things like that that they may want to communicate with their grandson or their wife or friend or, you know, something like that.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: That’s amazing. I mean, it’s something that we take for granted, and the minute it’s taken away from you… I’m sure something like that as opposed to one of those really expensive devices to at least get the basics, right?

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: It gets them the basics and sometimes carrying the device around with them in different places like, the Lingraphic comes on a laptop. It’s a very nice piece of equipment. Sometimes, you just need something quick like this. It Fits in your pocket, Right?

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: So a mobile version?

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: Yeah, basically.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: That’s interesting. I don’t know how I could follow that. That’s a great one. So the next one for me has to do with balance training and I think the biggest piece here is trying to give people feedback and trying to allow them to correct their own mistakes, maybe some internal queuing versus someone else correcting them. And this app is called Clock Yourself. It has different levels. It goes from bronze the plan, and there’s also a cardiac level as well. But basically what it does is: It has a picture of a clock and the person stands there feet together and envisions a clock around them. And then, they can also look at this or not look at this depending on how hard you want to make it. And you can alter the speed. You can alter the duration. And when you hit go, I hit the wrong button, sorry… it will call out a number. So what the person needs to do is hear the number, a step to that number, step back, transfer their weight. You know, do all those things. And it’s a lot different than just telling somebody, you know, “You need to step forward. You need to step back.” They need to process it. They need to figure out where it is and space. They need to get back to, again, speed and all that type of stuff. You can actually do it in different languages where you can have the person actually try to learn numbers of different language, just adding sort of cognitive overload which you would appreciate and you could look at it or not look at it.

So it’s all about feedback.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: My mind went immediately to the processing speed piece of it.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: And how often, I mean, we know older people fall down oftentimes and are doing two things at once. So it’s something that can really add to your treatment sessions. But you’ve got to do it in a skilled way and then progress to maybe a home exercise program once you’ve kind of got them at a level and you’re just going to have them practice. Right.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: I have another one here. It’s called the Space Retrieval Therapy app. And space retrieval nowadays is becoming a wider-used therapy technique, especially with those individuals that have some type of memory impairment. And what it does is it trains a target question so that person can then maybe do a procedure or do an activity in daily living, something like that. And it asks the same question in the same manner over an increasing amount of time.

And what this does is it tracks for you: So you ask the question, you present them with the target, if they get it right, you hit yes and then it immediately starts tracking the time down to when you would ask that person again. And if they get it wrong that time, then it brings you back. So those things that I used to have to do with my timer and my phone as I’m trying to do it, this operates that for you. So it makes that intervention of space retrieval that much easier for the clinician and I feel like I can get more done with the client because of that app and it’s just a very simple. I wish I would’ve thought of that.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: So I mean the second you mentioned that I immediately thought about the gentleman that we saw not too long ago that could never remember to use his walker. And I remember when we collaborated and talked about, you know, what can I do to try to help remind him in space retrieval. I mean, I wish we had that then but now we do. That’s awesome.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: I mean the other big one, I think there’s there’s probably two, and these are pretty much the last one I’m going to talk about, standard on every phone, it’s just your typical timer. You know at times you need to get away from how many reps somebody does. How far did they walk. You know, for an older person a lot of times, it’s how long can they walk. How long can they stand. How long I do an activity even for billing purposes and all that stuff. So a timer’s really important and you can use the lap function. You know that people don’t really think about that even for timing functional outcome measures and things like that. So just your standard timers are a really big one for both visible.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: And I know that we thought of one we both had on our list was the metronome.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Yeah.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: And I put it on there from a intelligibility speech standpoint where the metronome you could set at different paces to help that person pace so they can get their speech out in a more intelligible manner. And I know you said the same thing. You were you were using it from like a pacing of someone’s…

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Pacing of stepping, all that type of stuff, so yeah, it’s almost the exact same thing from a physical perspective. So that one definitely crosses over.

Jonross Neptune, MS, CCC-SLP: So there’s a lot of metronome apps out there. I know I have a couple different ones on my phone that I use.

Dr. Will Dieter, PT, DPT, GCS, FSOAE: Yeah. I went to the app store last night, was looking at them and saw like 20 of them. There was a bunch of them. So great. So again just a couple of apps we think would be helpful for the treating clinician. Again, Hotter 5. Thanks for coming.