As the number of people with musculoskeletal disorders increases due to the growing older adult population, interest is mounting in home rehabilitation exercises that allow people to continue their rehabilitation at home.

Rehabilitation exercises can prevent recurrence after surgery and help patients return to daily life quickly. However, motivating patients to continue exercising without medical workers and increase exercise efficiency is difficult.

A company has solved this unmet medical need with artificial intelligence (AI) object recognition technology. iPixel has developed an AI rehabilitation exercise coaching solution, EXERCITE Care. The company has discovered a new area by combining the two medical specialties of rehabilitation and home training under the slogan “healthy life in the entire life cycle.”

EXERCITE Care is an AI rehabilitation exercise coaching solution that allows medical staff to prescribe rehabilitation exercises for patients who need rehabilitation or have musculoskeletal diseases. It can provide customized patient prescriptions based on the rehabilitation exercise curriculum of medical staff, physical therapists, and exercise experts. It features receiving real-time feedback on rehabilitation exercises.

It is also the only service with AI technology that runs on LG smart TVs. Consumers can download and run the TV-specific app and experience AI-based exercise coaching on the big screen through a regular webcam or smartphone.

Through EXERCITE Care, iPixel plans to provide an efficient and effective environment for medical practitioners to diagnose and prescribe easily and for people who need rehabilitation exercises to continue exercising. In addition, it plans to build a business model by sharing income with medical institutions through the challenge of licensing digital therapy devices.

Korea Biomedical Review met with iPIXEL CEO Lee Sang-soo, who recently won the “KHF Innovation Award” at the K-HOSPITAL+HEALTH TECH FAIR with HIMSS 2023, to learn more about the development background and future direction of EXERCITE Care.

Question: How did you come to develop EXERCITE Care?

Answer: It started with How FIT, a home training service that utilizes AI object recognition technology. How FIT won the top prize for "Self-improvement Application of the Year 2021" from Google Play. After that, medical institutions started contacting us. There are still unmet medical needs in orthopedics, rehabilitation, and surgical patient care. With the support of the Ministry of Science and ICT, we conducted joint research with medical institutions and developed EXERCITE Care.

Q: What drew medical institutions to EXERCITE Care?

A: I thought rehabilitation exercises would be different from regular exercises, but they weren't that different. However, doctors were interested in whether patients followed through with their exercise prescriptions before their next visit. Professional athletes who come in every day after surgery to do rehabilitation exercises can measure how much they've improved with exercise, but not all patients can do that. In addition, patients who live in rural areas may not be followed up for a month, making it difficult to know exactly how much they have improved. With EXERCITE Care, patients can continue their rehabilitation exercises at home and get immediate feedback on their improvement.

Q: How is this different from the traditional prescription of rehabilitation exercises?

A: Typically, the hospital will give you a paper guide with exercises based on your condition. An exercise therapist or physiotherapist would teach you how to do the exercises, and you would go home and do them until your next appointment. In recent years, hospitals have also started to post videos on their YouTube channels. However, there must be a way to know if patients follow through.

With EXERCITE Care, exercise coaching is provided based on a doctor's prescription, and a customized exercise routine can be created, including the number of reps per set and rest periods for each exercise, based on the patient's condition. After each workout, information is collected on how much the patient's shoulder angle improves, how often they did the exercise, and what time of day they did it. This data is collected and sent back to the hospital app. Doctors can view the exercise program during the patient's visit and use it for research. Currently, Sejong Hospital is using EXERCITE Care for exercise therapy for rehabilitation patients.

Q: Doctors are the ones who use EXERCITE Care. On what did you focus on developing the solution?

A: The diagnosis, prescription, and research areas remain with the doctors. Suppose they use our technology to prescribe and create their treatments. In that case, we are the platform that provides the technology, so we want to build a business model to share the revenue with hospitals when we get the digital therapy device licensed.

Q: You aim at a healthy life in the entire life cycle. What does it mean?

A: If you get injured, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get surgery, and that's all the physical therapy you can receive. In Korea, where there is no care system, no one can take care of you after that. For example, if you have hip surgery, your prognosis depends on whether you go home and continue rehabilitation exercises, but there is no such system. You can't replace exercise with medication. I think digital healthcare can help people manage their health by motivating them to continue exercising.