Rehab Made Easy
- haileycrawford3
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Dr. Eric Dinkins is an experienced Physical Therapist with a demonstrated history of working in leadership and managerial roles in the hospital & health care industry. He is skilled in spine, vestibular rehabilitation, manual therapy, healthcare management, and healthcare. He is the co-owner of Motion Guidance, which is a development company for rehabilitation tools utilizing visual feedback.He has helped expand this concept of immediate visual feedback, in both research and clinical components, to enhance current and new rehabilitation techniques.
Episode Highlights:
4:32 – Physical therapist to entrepreneur. “I grew up playing a lot of sports and was always interested in getting over minor injuries. I had a couple mentors in high school youth groups that that were into physical therapy, and I determined in college that my personality was better suited for talking to people for longer than a handful of minutes, so I went down the physical therapy route. After a few years, I was a resident mentor for Talmadge towel player and that's when we first started connecting. We were working on some return-to-sporting athletes, mechanics and trying not to overload certain tissues during functional rehab when he had the idea of putting a laser on this body part and give these people an idea in real time how they were moving. That's the genesis of motion guidance.”
7:24 – Capturing and interpreting the data. “The base product, with just the laser on any body part, is giving you immediate feedback and then it's interpretive from there. That's how we can keep our costs down for a lot of our users. Our newest generations include interactive pod systems that you can interact with our laser or with touch. That's giving you more data on the time it takes them to interact with the pod, the current data compared to data from sessions weeks or months ago, and the speed and accuracy at which they're reacting. We have future ventures that are looking at more true time motion capture that you can then see a printout of how you are actually moving. That would allow us to see very specific changes in movement patterns and things that were outside of standard deviations. That's coming down the road, but for right now, the two options are either getting immediate data with our pods or just interpretation of real-time information.”
8:43 – The pod, the laser, and how it works (Go to 15:32 in our video episode on PodBean for a visual explanation). “The pod is designed to be a small singular device that has a sensor located in the middle of it, but with a parameter that's about six inches by six inches. Ours are hexagon shape, but some are circular. You can put these on the ground, on the wall, or on the ceiling in our particular mode. You can put them on backdrops and move them around however you want, but they're designed to give a target that you interact with with touch or with our laser. There are light and sound capabilities with each pod, and they come in a full system. Our system has five pods with a five-pack expansion so you can go up to ten pods. The laser allows you to interact from a distance instead of having to be physically tied to the pod. I can put it on a head, an arm, a thigh, a torso, a waist, an ankle. The laser allows you to have the full range of adapting it to whatever your patient need is. The idea here is typically with rehab, we will have people doing two different components. We'll have them do a very specific component of rehabilitation and very generalized exercises. Oftentimes for different conditions, they're just segmented too much. The laser with motion guidance interactives allows us to do two things at once.”
17:38 – Prevention program. “It gives the ability to see what you're doing in real time. There's also a delineating line for a lot of clinicians who have either really high-tech equipment that costs a lot of money or nothing. A great middle ground is being able to put that laser on a body part, have them do the activity and give them very specific, real-time interpretation/feedback. My clinic and others across the world have been using it to help aid in getting people to athletics, but then you want to take that feedback away. We don't want them to be tied to return-to-sport by seeing something. They have to be able to feel it, train it and experience it.”
19:46 – Creation and evolution of the app. “Some of that tech was already out there and we approached some companies to tell them they were missing the laser interactive part of it, which we needed. It is similar tech to laser tag, which uses infrared, and we needed it inside of a pod. We found people who were be able to produce that, then we had to tie that to an app. The challenges are just fairly limitless. We have a new app game that we developed called Keep It Still, which means the laser has to stay on the pod. If it's on the pod, it's green. If it's off the pod, it's red. People get immediate feedback. You can just adapt it as a clinician to whatever your need is. That's how we're going to innovate for the future - clinicians have a wish for a function and we create it. This is not a take it or leave it product. We need it to innovate with people who are more brilliant than we are. The app is controlling the apps through Bluetooth and is free to download. We provide four free games, and the rest are by subscription. It's a $10 subscription a month.”
27:18 - Gamification of data collection. “We have a lot of room to scale. For right now, we have the ability to save profiles on the app so you can keep going back and record session to session to see how people are doing. We don't have interaction as far as a way for people to do it and record the data at home because most people don't have it at home. That's going to be another generation. The data is going to be correct vs incorrect and the length of time it took you to interact with a certain pod. That data will be based on color interaction - if people are having problems with purple vs red, or light blue vs dark blue, we can actually see the differences of color interaction, which is a cool feature, especially for athletics. If you are having problems with a certain color that we offer and that's the jersey that you're playing against, that might not go so well, right? We can dial that in. We're controlling a lot of the data right now and giving that feedback, but we also want some flexibility for clinicians to be a little creative, which has surprisingly been a little bit of a limiting factor. A lot of clinicians want to be told what to do, but eventually they’re going to have to start making clinical decisions for their particular patient, right? We can show them how to use the device and how to go through these games, but then there is going to be this problem-solving interaction that actually has to happen with most of our patients anyway.”
33:33 – Prices for different levels. “We have different levels. If you want the full neuro station, which has magnetizing pods that are easily movable, designs on the eight-by-eight backdrop, the full 10 pack, a stand to put your device on, all the straps and lasers that you need, that's $1,300 right now. If you just want the pods themselves with straps and lasers and no backdrop or expansion pack, that's $499. If you want no pods and just visual feedback via lasers, three different designs, and the ability to still put it on your body anywhere, that's $299. If you want the patient packs that has a very streamlined version of a laser that you can send home with your patients to do their continued home exercise."
36:53 - Reimbursement and ROI. “From a coding standpoint, you can adapt this to whatever you're actually doing functionally. It could be any CPT code that you need for therapeutic activities, therapeutic exercise, neuromuscular reeducation, biofeedback. You can layer these by using that just to maximize your billing that way. I have had specific conditions where there's been letters of medical necessity submitted to insurance and people have been getting their pods through their HSA or FSA covered, so you'd have to reach out to your primary provider with that. Of course, you can do fee for service to come in and interact with the pods. Also, the patient packs can be bought in bulk by clinicians at a 40% discount and they can be resold their distribution or through their own clinics. Our patient packs come in groups of five. Over that, contact us directly to figure out the best price for you. The discount has to be a minimum of five, then you can redistribute those. Many of our chiropractic clients are buying these in bulk, and they add that onto their fee schedule for intensives or anything else. They can layer it however they want, from the clinician standpoint.”
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