App
Plinth
Home exercises patients can follow between visits
Client
Plinth
Year
2025
Timeline
12 weeks
Role
Lead product designer, with Plinth’s engineering team
Services
Research · Product design · Prototyping · Design system
The brief
Plinth makes software for outpatient physical therapy clinics. Most patients see their physical therapist once or twice a week, and much of the work happens at home in between. In practice, the home program lives on a printed sheet that often doesn’t make it to week two. Therapists find out at the next visit, after a week nobody can get back.
Plinth had a working prototype and a pilot clinic in Chicago. They needed a patient app people would keep using through a plan of care, and a view that showed therapists who needed a call.
What I did
I spent two days at the pilot clinic, sat in on sessions with patients’ permission, and talked by phone with patients who agreed to help. The same three problems kept coming up. Patients didn’t remember how an exercise should feel. They skipped days when something hurt and didn’t know if that was okay. And they had no way to tell whether they were getting better.
I designed around those three. Each day opens with a short plan. Every exercise has a video from the patient’s clinic and a note from their physical therapist on what they should feel. If something hurts, patients can message the clinic from the exercise, and the therapist decides whether to skip or change it. After a session, patients log pain on a 0 to 10 scale. A spike flags the therapist, and the patient sees the next day’s plan as usual. A weekly view shows sessions completed and how pain has changed.
For therapists, I designed a web dashboard that lists patients by who may need a call. They assign a home program from a library the clinic builds once and reuses.
I built a component library shared by the patient app and the therapist dashboard, then worked with Plinth’s engineers through the build and reviewed every screen before release.
After launch
The pilot clinic dropped printed sheets for patients using the app. Therapists can open a visit already seeing what was logged at home, and Plinth is taking the app to its next clinics.
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