RoboFit – Your first session
Your initial assessment
Many clients have asked questions such as ‘is this for me?’ and ‘how does it all work?’. With this blog, our goal is to walk you through the RoboFit experience so you understand what the initial assessment session entails and the sorts of questions you’ll be asked.
To date, we’ve had clients with Multiple Sclerosis, Stroke Survivors, and Spinal Cord Injuries (both complete and incomplete), and brain injuries attend RoboFit.
What’s involved
At RoboFit, your initial assessment is primarily going to involve getting to know you – this is vital to learning about your specific circumstances, abilities and what sort of interventions we can make that can assist you to meet your goals.
We like to get to know you first so that we can make sure that this would be the right tool to add to your health and wellbeing journey.
Step 1
First, we’re going to get to know more about you and your general health. For example we’ll be measuring such things as;
- Your resting blood pressure
- Your rest heart rate.
This will help us to understand your baseline when you’re not working out.
Step 2
Next, when we talk to you about your primary condition, we’re going to ask you a few questions about such things as
- Your history
- Any major accidents
- Complications
- Hospital visits
We’ll then go through your past medical history to build a profile that can help us to understand where you’re at right now.
We’ll also need to know some other standard details such as medications that you’re taking, as well as allergies. Sharing this information helps inform our trainers more about how we can best cater your sessions to suit your needs.
Step 3
After that, it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty and talk about your main perceived impairments, such as fatigue, spasticity etc. We’ll build a profile of any pain you’re living with, whether that be musculoskeletal or neuropathic, and then any other allied health treatments that you’re undergoing currently.
Step 4
Next, we’ll discuss what your average day looks like (both pre and post diagnosis). This will help us to better understand what your goals are, and what we can do at RoboFit to help you achieve them, as well as what the most realistic improvements we can help make are.
Step 5
Finally, after completing this initial screening, we’ll get you moving and measure various indicators such as;
- Range of motion
- Muscle strength
- Sensation and tone.
This will help tremendously when it comes to tracking progress and changes during your HAL sessions.
Then it’s time to get you into the exoskeleton so you can have a brief look at what’s to come!
