• Dates: 2025-07-01 - present
  • Status: unfinished
  • Importance: 4

I’ve been working on a side project exploring how to advance digital health information and physical therapy (PT) to help people with musculoskeletal injuries. It’s inspired by my, my family’s, friends’, and volleyball teammates’ experiences with ankle sprains, rotator cuff weakness, hand injuries, back pain, etc. Here’s the progress I’ve recorded:

  • July 2025: I tested o3 on the PT “bar exam” and saw it score 90th percentile among test-takers (among starting PTs).
  • August 2025: I talked with a couple PT friends about the project. I also tested GPT-5 on clinical case scenarios from Academy of Orthopaedic Physical Therapy monographs, and saw strong results.
  • September 2025: I made progress on a slightly buggy SvelteKit prototype of a PT diagnoser/questionnaire app for shoulder pain. I also explored the idea of publishing a short paper on AI’s ability to give PT advice and broached the idea to some friends and PhD program-mates.
  • October 2025: I read some content on the need to test adoption and deeply understand users for an app like a PT app (Mom Test and Four Steps to the Epiphany). This reading made me feel this app would be somewhat more work than I initially thought. I also built a landing page for a potential PT app (https://www.getmuvo.com/) and set up Google Analytics for it. I then reflected on the purpose/goal of the landing page experiment and study design.
  • November 2025: I learned about how many people get their health info from Cleveland Clinic and reflected on the role this could play for musculoskeletal information. I also dug deeper into the paper idea with a friend in medical evals. I also read studies on PT effectiveness.

Throughout all this, I’ve been testing fundamental hypotheses behind this work, ranging from

  • how precisely I need to diagnose someone for PT exercises to help them (and not hurt them), to
  • whether it makes sense to (a) build the app, (b) go for a more academic accomplishment, or (c) do nothing (but perhaps write up a diagnosis of the area) in this area in terms of personal happiness and impact.