Testing With Patients at Egas Moniz Hospital

After several weeks of hardware assembly, dashboard development, and internal testing, we had the opportunity to bring our prototype into a clinical setting. This visit was an important milestone for the project: it allowed us to observe how the system behaves outside the controlled environment of our own tests, and how useful the collected data can be when interpreted alongside clinical experience.

The goal of the session was not only to verify that the prototype worked, but also to understand how it fits into a real patient-testing workflow. We focused on setup time, sensor placement, data acquisition, dashboard usability, and the clarity of the session outputs.

The team wishes to express its deepest gratitude to Neurology Service Director Professor Miguel Viana Baptista for helping to bring to life the rewarding expericence of applying our prototype to an important real world setting, and hopefully have a positive impact on the patients’ rehab process. We also want to thank Physiotherapist Carla Ganhão for her constant availabilty to be in contact with us, and for facilitating the interaction with patients. A big thank you as well to Doctor Marta Magriço for acepting our project and arranging the testing day, and to Doctor Maria Monteiro for her help while we were in the ward collecting data. We finally want to thank the entire Hospital Egaz Moniz-ULSO, more specifically the Neurology Unit.

What We Tested

During the visit, we used the wearable nodes and dashboard together as a complete prototype workflow. The session helped us evaluate:

• how quickly the system could be prepared before testing;
• whether the wearable nodes were practical to handle in a clinical room;
• how reliably the dashboard could receive and organize the collected data;
• how useful session summaries, patient profiles, and notes could be for later review;
• which parts of the workflow still need refinement before broader validation.

This was especially valuable because patient testing introduces constraints that are difficult to reproduce in the lab: limited time, the need for clear instructions, different movement patterns, and the importance of keeping the interaction comfortable and unobtrusive.

Main Takeaways

The visit gave us a clearer picture of what matters most when moving from an engineering prototype to a tool that could support clinicians. The technical side is only one part of the challenge. The system also needs to be fast to prepare, easy to explain, and clear enough that the resulting data can be interpreted after the session without confusion.

The dashboard proved particularly important. Patient profiles, saved session histories, and clinical notes make the tool more useful as a longitudinal monitoring system rather than a one-time signal viewer. Seeing the prototype used in this context helped us prioritize improvements around reporting, session organization, and clinician-facing summaries.

Next Steps

Based on the testing session, our next priorities are:

1. Perform gait analysis on healthy individuals for comparison with the results obtained on this test session.

2. Present the complete results to the neurology department doctors and physiotherapists. Coming soon is a more thorough blog post detailing these.

3. Refine the metric algorythms according to their feedback.

Patient-related data and observations from this visit are handled with care. This post only describes the project workflow and does not disclose identifiable patient information.