Project
Team (Sue Hong, Yaezi Lee, Evan Zhang)
Duration
6 Weeks, Oct ~ Dec 2025
Tools
Figma, Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Midjourney & Gemini
My role
Product Designer
I led the problem framing, UI design and interactive prototyping.
Overview
Reeha improves upper-limb patient outcomes by making recovery engaging and fun.
Home rehabilitation is an important step for patients with upper-limb injury; but repetitive tasks, slow improvements, and limited provider guidance reduce their motivations and hinder recovery.
Problem
Home rehabilitation often breaks down due to low motivation.
1. Continuing practice alone is hard. 2. Low motivation in repetitive and mundane exercise routine. 3. Uncertainty about performing exercises correctly.
Stakeholder Map
The system had two core user groups.
Our team mapped stakeholders to define scope and target users. The map also helped us identify essential clinical perspectives from therapists to guide product decisions and ensure clinical relevance.
User & Expert Interview
8 user interviews and 4 expert interviews
We identified monotony, confusion, and disconnection from clinical guidance as key barriers to sustained home rehabilitation. Patients don’t just want to perform exercises correctly but to feel supported. "I do my exercises, but I don't know if I'm doing them right." — Patient #3, 4 months post-surgery "When my therapist isn't watching, my form drifts within a week." — Patient #6 "Compliance drops after week 3 unless we add visual milestones." — Occupational Therapist, 12 years in upper-limb rehab
Patient Interview
Expert Interview
Full interview protocols and synthesis in case deck.
Interview Insights
Users don’t just want to do exercises correctly. They want to feel accompanied, understood, and see their own progress over time.
Across both groups the same two clusters surfaced: design & tech gaps in the tools they had, and psychological barriers in the experience itself.
Persona
Six months in, alone at home.
Sarah is 31, a preschool teacher in Pittsburgh. She tore her rotator cuff indoor climbing last spring. The first month she had PT three times a week and could feel herself getting better. The five months since have had her at home, mostly alone.
Name
Sarah
Age
38
Location
Pittsburgh, PA
Job
Preschool Teacher
Hobby
Indoor climbing
What she said
"I don't always know if I'm doing it right, and there's nobody to ask."
"I'll do it for a week, miss two days, and then I can't get back to it."
"The exercises aren't hard. Remembering why I'm doing them is hard."
What she actually needs
A reason to start each day, not just a reminder to.
Confirmation she's doing the movement right, in the moment, not in next week's appointment.
Visible signs she's getting better, because six months in, she can't feel the difference herself.
What she does not need
Another tracking dashboard.
A streak counter that makes her feel guilty for missing two days.
Solution
Your daily rehab companion
Mini-games
Prescribed exercises mapped to everyday motions so the motion the therapist needs is the motion the game requires.
Exercise reports
Each session ends in a recap that shows small wins. It contains degrees of motion regained, sessions completed.
Therapist's prescription
Clinicians remotely adjust exercises and difficulty based on the patient's data, keeping care continuous between visits.
Key Insight
Therapy disguised as a familiar task.
Each mini-game maps a prescribed exercise onto a daily-life action (baking, gardening, ball games). The motion the therapist needs the patient to perform is the same motion that progresses the game. Difficulty scales with the patient's data, so the baking game tightens or loosens with recovery without the patient noticing they've been leveled up.
Key Feature
Why a Baking Theme Mini-Game?
In interviews, patients kept naming what they wanted back, such as making coffee, gardening, baking with their kids. The repetition they wanted was the kind embedded in daily life. So we built the game around motions their body already knew.
User flow
Five steps from open to recap.
The user flow includes: checking daily goals, choosing a game, watching the tutorial, training through mini-games, and reviewing the report.
User journey map
Where motivation rises and drops.
Mapping the patient experience across one session and across a recovery month surfaced the moments when motivation typically dips (entering tired, hesitating before unfamiliar movements). We placed feedback exactly at those drop points: encouragement during setup, mid-game cues that reward correct form, and weekly summaries that make slow gains visible.
System Map
The therapist writes and the camera reads.
1. Digital Section The therapist sends a prescription so tracking info flows back after each session, shaping what the patient sees next.
2. Physical Section Visual and audio content guides the patient on the tablet screen, while the TrueDepth camera reads their motion data in real time.
Wireframe
Sketching what the patient sees first.
I sketched each screen to lock the flow before committing to a visual language. Lo-fi let me focus on hierarchy and pacing. I structured how much patients see at the start of a session, how voice prompts replace touch input during exercises, and how progress surfaces without competing with the next action.
Design iteration
What changed between v1 and the final.
1. Home: text list → photo cards. Early versions listed exercises by name. The final shows each movement as a photo card, so patients recognize it at a glance. 2. Game screen: shrinking the HUD. The camera feed and timer moved through three positions. The final keeps the game scene full-bleed, with the camera and two small chips in the corners. 3. Game selection: one grid → two steps. v1 was a single grid of games. The final asks mode first (Exercise with Game or Exercise Only), then theme. Some patients, on some days, don't want a game.
Visual Tone
Clinical confidence with playful moments.
Most rehab tools borrow the sterile language of medical software. Reeha goes the other way. A muted palette and rounded typography let the interface feel joyful instead of clinical. The characters function as a non-clinical presence in moments where patients might otherwise feel observed. Soft volumes, headbands instead of medical accessories, no measuring devices in hand.
Prototyping
Engineering the loop.
We mapped the entire game loop to joint-node tracking. All the cupcake states are functions of where the patient's shoulder, elbow, and wrist sit relative to a calibrated threshold range. Pull down within range, frosting flows. Push up smoothly, next cupcake. Step outside the range, the piping fails.
Demo session
Engineering the loop.
We exhibited a working prototype at the CMU Design Week. Watching first-time users move through setup, the tutorial, and a full mini-game session surfaced moments we'd missed in screen-only testing: camera placing confusion. Movement-based interfaces have a one-second window.
Paper · Coursework
Gamified Upper-Limb Recovery Through Sensor-Enhanced Exercises.
A pictorial-style writeup of the Reeha project, produced as coursework at CMU MDes (Fall 2025). The paper explores the research framing and system architecture in academic format. "How might we make home rehabilitation for upper limb recovery more engaging so patients stay motivated throughout recovery?" — from the research framing.
Special
Thanks to
Technical Advisor: Shemona Singh User interview: Terry Oh, Sophia Wu, Daniel Wu, Timothy Tang, Erik Benson, Eric Hsieh, Kristen Song, John Lee Expert interview: Anne Marie Sweeney OT, Jared Todorowski PT, Justin Berthold DO, Lindsay Lehman PT Professors: Andrew Twigg, Stacie Rohrbach
