Lifting weights can keep you carrying groceries and riding bikes even as you get older. To join or not to join a gym: That is the question. If you opt out of building a home gym, you can join a club and have access to more weights and machines. Friends and classes motivate you to keep coming, and that monthly bill keeps you disciplined. On the other hand, gym memberships are steep, workouts can get hijacked by bullies, and going to the gym is an additional commute.

Avoid injury and improve efficiency with tips from a physical therapist. Don't be a snow hero. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. You know, for life's most essential resource, water knows a hundred ways to kill you if you're not careful. When it's not trying to drown you in its pools and coastlines during the summer, it shape-shifts to snow in the winter, piling up emergency room visits for those forced to shovel it.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of tasks (Google, 2023; OpenAI, 2023; Zhao et al., 2023). This success has led to their widespread adoption and significant involvement in various decision-making applications, such as healthcare (Karabacak and Margetis, 2023; Sallam, 2023; Yang et al., 2023), education (Xiao et al., 2023), finance (Wu et al., 2023b), and law (Zhang et al., 2023a). However, despite their rapid adoption, the reliability of LLMs in handling high-stakes tasks has yet to be demonstrated (Arkoudas, 2023; Huang et al., 2023a). The reliability is particularly critical in domains such as healthcare, where model responses can have immediate and significant impacts on human behavior and hence their well-being (Ji et al., 2023). Therefore, understanding LLMs' reasoning and decision-making processes and how they influence response uncertainty is critical for their safe and reliable deployment.

Recent global estimates suggest that as many as 2.41 billion individuals have health conditions that would benefit from rehabilitation services. Home-based Physical Therapy (PT) faces significant challenges in providing interactive feedback and meaningful observation for therapists and patients. To fill this gap, we present MicroXercise, which integrates micro-motion analysis with wearable sensors, providing therapists and patients with a comprehensive feedback interface, including video, text, and scores. Crucially, it employs multi-dimensional Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and attribution-based explainable methods to analyze the existing deep learning neural networks in monitoring exercises, focusing on a high granularity of exercise. This synergistic approach is pivotal, providing output matching the input size to precisely highlight critical subtleties and movements in PT, thus transforming complex AI analysis into clear, actionable feedback. By highlighting these micro-motions in different metrics, such as stability and range of motion, MicroXercise significantly enhances the understanding and relevance of feedback for end-users. Comparative performance metrics underscore its effectiveness over traditional methods, such as a 39% and 42% improvement in Feature Mutual Information (FMI) and Continuity. MicroXercise is a step ahead in home-based physical therapy, providing a technologically advanced and intuitively helpful solution to enhance patient care and outcomes.

Physical therapy (PT) is a key component of many rehabilitation regimens, such as treatments for Parkinson's disease (PD). However, there are shortages of physical therapists and adherence to self-guided PT is low. Robots have the potential to support physical therapists and increase adherence to self-guided PT, but prior robotic systems have been large and immobile, which can be a barrier to use in homes and clinics. We present Stretch with Stretch (SWS), a novel robotic system for leading stretching exercise games for older adults with PD. SWS consists of a compact and lightweight mobile manipulator (Hello Robot Stretch RE1) that visually and verbally guides users through PT exercises. The robot's soft end effector serves as a target that users repetitively reach towards and press with a hand, foot, or knee. For each exercise, target locations are customized for the individual via a visually estimated kinematic model, a haptically estimated range of motion, and the person's exercise performance. The system includes sound effects and verbal feedback from the robot to keep users engaged throughout a session and augment physical exercise with cognitive exercise. We conducted a user study for which people with PD (n=10) performed 6 exercises with the system. Participants perceived the SWS to be useful and easy to use. They also reported mild to moderate perceived exertion (RPE).

Essen Health Care, a medical group in New York City, has a Center of Excellence for Pain with physical therapy, pain specialists, neurology and orthopedic specialists. It serves patients with acute and chronic issues in need of physical therapy. In addition, it serves many elderly house call patients, due to pandemic restrictions, who have functionally deteriorated due to a lack of physical activity. Continuity and access to care for patients living with chronic diseases or going through cardiac and orthopedic rehabilitation are one of the most challenging areas in healthcare. Difficulties include ensuring the quality of recovery, reducing readmission, increasing accessibility to therapy and increasing compliance with personalized treatment.

Musculoskeletal care is a big problem for the U.S. healthcare system, digital health companies say. Disorders are common and expensive to treat, but care that could cut down those high costs is inaccessible to many who need it. That message is resonating with investors. Over the past year, they've poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the digital MSK space. Unicorns Hinge Health and SWORD Health both closed multiple rounds of funding in 2021, some worth nine figures.

It began with a pulled muscle. Each day after school, as the sun sank dusky purple over the hills of my hometown, I'd run with my track teammates. Even on our easy days, I'd bound ahead, leaving them behind. It wasn't that I thought myself better than them--it's that when I ran fast, and focused on nothing but the cold air burning my lungs and my feet pounding, my normally anxious thoughts turned to white noise. I limped a little, and then tried running again: sharp, hot pain radiated down my thigh. Panic flooded me, as I imagined weeks without running: weeks without a predictable break from my own thoughts, weeks immersed in adolescent loneliness.

This column keeps returning to the healthcare industry because it is so much more complex and varied than so many others. Artificial intelligence (AI) coverage has focused on radiology, has moved to the operating theater, and has been discussed in the back office. Insurance and pharma fraud are arenas where AI risk analysis is useful. Now, along comes another area that is amenable to AI solutions. It's something many people think of as secondary, but is really a critical part of healthcare: physical therapy.

This column keeps returning to the healthcare industry because it is so much more complex and varied than so many others. Artificial intelligence (AI) coverage has focused on radiology, has moved to the operating theater, and has been discussed in the back office. Insurance and pharma fraud are arenas where AI risk analysis is useful. Now, along comes another area that is amenable to AI solutions. It's something many people think of as secondary, but is really a critical part of healthcare: physical therapy.