Designing Remote Recovery for Joint Replacement Patients
Role: Lead Designer
Scope: user research, mobile and web app design, accessibility, wearable sensor data integration, cross-functional collaboration with hardware and engineering teams, usability testing
The Challenge
Strive MedTech was a Green Bay, Wisconsin-based digital health company built around a single problem: joint replacement recovery depended on frequent in-person visits and self-reported patient logs, so care teams could only see how a patient was actually doing when they showed up in the office. Founded in 2016 by orthopedic surgeon Dr. Padraic Obma and backed by TitletownTech, the venture partnership between the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft, Strive set out to move that entire journey, from diagnosis through recovery, onto a platform both patients and care teams could see into from anywhere.
My Role
I was the Lead Designer for Strive’s patient rehabilitation app, across both the mobile and web experience. I worked onsite with Dr. Obma and the clinic team throughout the project, close enough to the day-to-day to interview patients directly, observe rehab sessions in progress, and see firsthand where the existing process broke down. I worked with orthopedic specialists, the hardware engineers building the FDA-registered wearable sensor technology, and developers to turn that on-the-ground understanding, along with the real-time recovery data coming off the wearable, into an interface patients and their care teams could actually use, not just view.
The Approach
I went to the clinic to interview patients directly and observe rehab sessions in person, rather than relying on remote surveys or secondhand reports. Sitting in on those sessions surfaced things a survey wouldn’t: where patients got confused mid-exercise, what actually kept them motivated, and how much of “non-compliance” was really about unclear instructions rather than willpower. Working closely with Dr. Obma and the clinical staff throughout kept the research grounded in what was clinically necessary, not just what was easy to build. That shaped the core features: personalised rehab plans, progress tracking pulled straight from the wearable’s sensor data instead of self-reported logs, and motivational feedback built to keep patients engaged through a process that’s often slow and discouraging.
Designing for every patient, not just the tech-fluent ones. Patients ranged widely in age and tech comfort, many recovering with limited mobility. I prioritized clear, low-effort interactions over dense information, refined through iterative testing and feedback with real patients.
Turning sensor data into a two-way channel. The wearable technology fed real-time recovery data into the patient’s app. I designed that data into an interface that gave patients and their doctor a direct communication channel from home, replacing a share of the in-person visits recovery had depended on until then.
