FW-HTF-P: Future of Work for Strength and Movement Training Professionals

This planning grant will focus on the future of work challenges for strength and movement training
professionals(SMTPs) that include physical therapists, occupational therapists, and personal trainers. These
workers make up a field that is essential to injury prevention and recovery, predominantly female, and
924,000 strong growing much faster than average (15-29% per year). Unfortunately, this field is currently
underscored by job strain, administrative burden, and burn out. SMTPs are facing an increasing remote care
trend (accelerated by the COVID pandemic), and outcome-based reimbursement has been evolving over
the last decade. The future of work in this area will require versatile and affordable tools to collect objective and clear performance metrics. With advances in human strength, movement, and stability monitoring with wearable sensors, combined with machine learning there is an opportunity to drive client/patient accountability, give better insights into progress, and enrich increasing popular remote training sessions.
This will give future workers in this area greater work flexibility, improve outcomes, and create more room
for the human connection both trainer/therapist and client/patient draw satisfaction from. The project will
leverage a recently developed technology that can track a person's performance during strength training. It
measures strength, range and speed of motion, rest time, number of reps and sets, force applied to the
exercise equipment, and power. Algorithms use these data to provide detailed reports on a person's
performance with accessible visualization. This planning grant will help develop a research agenda that
includes all the necessary convergent disciplines to transform the future of work in this area and provide
the industry with a much-needed tool that promotes greater job satisfaction and reduced job strain through
increased training successes. In addition, it will enable future workers in this area to be more accessible and enable more flexible access to rehabilitation, which will mean faster return to work after injury and more broadly improve wellness and reduce disease burden in the general population. This project will bring together several disciplines, including engineers, social scientists, strength and movement training scientists, and economists. The investigator team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals. This planning grant will seek to establish a clear landscape of the work context through qualitative research including a series of worker and stakeholder interviews and review of relevant healthcare policies. It will also focus on the development of a minimum viable prototype to collect data from the appropriate body segment or strength training accessory, algorithms to appropriately interpret the sensor data, and an initial web application. Finally, it will enable the development and evaluation of a training module with SMTPs. Each of the three research thrusts - future work, future workers, and future technology - will be considered when evaluating the outcomes of the planning grant. Quantitative methods will be used where appropriate to judge things like technology performance and qualitative assessments such as interviews and standardized surveys will be used to assess the social and perception driven elements. This project has been funded by the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier cross-directorate program to promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership in work contexts by advancing design of intelligent work technologies that operate in harmony with human workers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.