YourSteps Health®: Pediatric Rehabilitation Platform
YourSteps Health is a pediatric rehabilitation platform designed to connect therapists and families through a shared digital experience. Combining a therapist portal with a family-facing mobile app, it brings physical, occupational, and speech-language therapy into one engaging platform for children and young people ages 0–18.
Role & Expertise
Problem Statement
Families often find it difficult to keep up with therapy exercises, track progress, and stay connected with therapists between appointments. Paper handouts and emails can be easy to lose and hard to keep up with, making it challenging to maintain momentum at home. YourSteps Health® brings therapy plans, goals, and communication into one shared experience for families and providers.
Transform static paper exercise handouts into an interactive, gamified daily routine that keeps pediatric patients motivated at home?
–Family Engagement & Adherence
Enable two-way feedback between families and clinicians between visits without increasing parent workload or caregiver friction?
–Asynchronous Care & Feedback
Streamline therapist workflows so clinicians can quickly create, customize, and monitor exercise plans for diverse caseloads?
–Clinical Portal Efficiency
Project Goals
- • Centralized Collaboration: Create a unified platform for families and therapists to collaborate on care plans.
- • Improve Adherence: Boost home exercise completion through automated reminders and visual tracking.
- • Enable Remote Care: Support asynchronous and remote care with secure cross-device accessibility.
- • Streamline Portal: Provide clinicians with powerful web tools to prescribe and adjust plans seamlessly.
Target Audience & Personas
Families needing a simple, engaging tool that makes it easier to manage and stay on top of their child's therapy routines at home.
"Paper sheets get misplaced so easily. I need a simple video guide on my phone so I know we're doing the exercises correctly at home."
Physical, occupational, and speech-language specialists prescribing and monitoring care.
"I need to quickly assign tailored routines between patient sessions and see how kids are progressing without adding hours to my documentation."
Clinics seeking scalable, remote rehabilitation solutions for pediatric patients.
"A centralized telehealth portal helps us maintain continuous care for rural families who can't travel to the clinic every week."
Discovery & Research Strategy
To create an experience that worked for both clinicians and families, we combined weekly reviews with clinical experts, user interviews, and research into what makes therapy more engaging.
Clinical SME Weekly Syncs
Held weekly working sessions with the founder, an experienced pediatric therapist. Her expertise guided the prescription workflow, milestone tracking metrics, and clinical documentation needs.
Parent & Child Research
Conducted user research sessions with young patients and their parents. Parents requested clear step-by-step video guides and simple progress logs, while kids responded best to interactive feedback rather than text lists.
Gamification Analysis
Researched pediatric motivation models and competitive telehealth tools. Integrated reward badges, streak counters, and interactive flip-cards to transform repetitive exercises into engaging daily goals.
Process Logic & Dual-Persona Architecture
A key design challenge was catering to completely different user personas: time-strapped clinicians managing dozens of patients, and families completing therapy routines at home.
Key Design Iterations from Research
- • Routine Flip-Cards: Replaced long text instructions with interactive flip-card guides, allowing young patients and parents to quickly review exercise steps and video demos without leaving the daily schedule screen.
- • One-Touch Completion & Rating: Added simple post-exercise difficulty ratings ("Easy", "Just Right", "Hard") so children can give feedback and therapists can adjust intensity asynchronously.
- • Rapid Admin Prescription Builder: Streamlined the therapist portal to allow 3-click exercise assignments and template reuse, cutting prescription setup time significantly.
Key Features
1. Family Mobile App (iOS & Android)
Access exercise prescriptions, follow visual/video guides, track milestones, and message care providers directly.
2. Therapist & Admin Web Portal
Centralized dashboard for clinicians to manage prescriptions, monitor completion metrics, and update treatment plans.
3. Goal Setting & Progress Tracking
Collaborative goal creation with visual milestone feedback to keep patients motivated and parents informed.
4. Secure In-App Messaging & Telehealth
Integrated messaging, with the option for clinicians to enable in-app communication based on their hospital's policies, for easy check-ins and evaluations.
Results & Impact
YourSteps Health delivered significant improvements across patient engagement and care continuity:
Continuous
Family-Therapist Connection
Increased
Home Exercise Completion
Scalable
Remote Rural Care
Awarded
APTA Innovation Winner
Award & Recognition
In recognition of its real-world impact and innovation, YourSteps Health was honored with the APTA Pediatrics Practice Fair Innovation Award, celebrating top achievements in pediatric physical therapy.
Evolution
Design Evolution
Family Dashboard & Daily Schedule
• Making Routines Easy to Follow: Daily activities are organized into cards, giving families an at-a-glance view of what needed to be done. Progress indicators, video thumbnails, and simple checklists helped parents and young patients understand each activity and track their progress throughout the day.
Child Feedback & Difficulty Rating
• Giving Kids a Voice: After completing an exercise, children can quickly rate how it felt using simple smiley-face ratings. This gives young patients an easy way to share how they’re feeling while giving therapists useful feedback to better understand their experience at home.
Gamification & Rewards Engine
• Celebrating Progress: To keep young patients motivated throughout their therapy we introduced achievement badges and customizable rewards. Completing therapy sessions earns points. Those points can be redeemed for badges. This makes progress feel rewarding along the way.
Therapist & Admin Web Portal
• Streamlining Therapist Workflows: We designed a desktop portal to help therapists manage their caseload with less friction. Therapists can quickly search the exercise library, add custom videos, and track patient progress and completion of prescribed exercises.
Colors & Font
Visual Identity Rationale: For YourSteps Health®, the client's marketing team provided the core purple brand color and selected Avenir Next LT Pro as the primary typeface. We built on that foundation by developing a complementary palette of warm, accessible neutrals to create a visual system that felt both clinically credible and welcoming for children and families.
Color Palette
Typography: Avenir Next LT Pro
Avenir Next LT Pro was selected by the client as part of the established YourSteps Health® brand. Its clean, approachable letterforms provide strong legibility and help maintain a consistent visual experience across the family mobile app and clinical desktop portal.
