Peter Halliwell’s cardiac rehabilitation happened in a machinery shed, which his physiotherapist has never once described as ideal and has repeatedly described as better than nothing.

Uploads were reviewed twice weekly. The calls that followed were rarely about anything dramatic — a heart rate recovery that had drifted the wrong way across four sessions, that sort of thing.

What the monitor caught

Return to work was staged over eleven weeks rather than signed off in one appointment, with the occupational health assessment done before the first shift rather than after the first problem.

The alternative wasn’t a gym. The alternative was no rehab at all, for eleven weeks, at the point it matters most.

Nadia Kovač, cardiac physiotherapy

One year on

Nothing in the programme is technologically remarkable. The difference is that somebody is looking at the output on a schedule, and knows who they are looking at.

He finished all twelve sessions. Attendance in the remote cohort ran higher than the centre-based one that year.

Contributing writer

Nadia Kovač

A demonstration byline created for this prototype. Not a real writer, and not a clinician.

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