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Occupational therapist
Helps people who are ill, injured or disabled manage everyday life: assessing what they can do at home and work, running therapy, recommending equipment and home adaptations, and planning safe discharge from hospital. Robots and remote tools have been tested against therapists and mostly kept as additions: in a UK trial of 770 stroke patients, robot arm training did no better than usual care, and England's guideline now says not to offer it. Home visits by video cut a hospital service's therapist time from 160 to 40 minutes with no more falls, though one in five patients still needed an in-person visit. Online self-assessment now lets some people buy simple equipment without waiting for a therapist. The US projects 15% growth.
Find out whether your service offers video home visits and how it decides who still needs an in-person visit.
This is not a probability of losing your job. It combines how much of the role's task load is exposed to automation with how far adoption has actually gone — useful for comparing occupations on one consistent basis, and for nothing else.
Written for occupational therapists in hospitals, community services and private practice; physical therapists and speech-language pathologists have their own pages. The evidence is a US labour projection, a UK trial and England's stroke guideline on robot arm training, one Australian hospital service's video home visits and one Northern Irish trust's online equipment self-assessment; most of it concerns stroke rehabilitation and older adults, and it establishes what robots and remote tools do to the work, not how therapists' numbers or caseloads have changed.
What is actually changing#
The unit of analysis is the task, not the job title. A role is not replaced — its task mix shifts.
Each tile is one task. Its size is how much of the job it is; its colour is where the task is heading. Click a tile to see what the judgement does not establish.
One service's retrospective comparison run by its own therapists; patients were not randomised.
One trial and one guideline, both about arm rehabilitation after stroke; they do not cover other therapy or newer devices.
One pilot of a rule-based tool with no outcome data; it does not show how much assessment work has moved.
Inferred without a record on documentation; it does not measure record-keeping time.
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Recent changes#
United States. The statistics bureau projects employment of occupational therapists to grow 15 percent from 2025 to 2035, from 169,600, with about 10,000 openings a year. It says demand will rise as the older adult population grows, since older adults are more likely to have disabilities and limitations in everyday tasks. It does not mention technology.
A named person with standing publicly predicted something, on a date, in an attributable statement. It is recorded so that who said what, and when, stays checkable — and it never moves a task's assessment, because a prediction is not an observation. Its value arrives later: the record sits on the same page as the evidence about that occupation, so anyone reading the forecast reads the record of what happened next beside it. That is the reckoning; this site publishes no verdict on whether a forecast came true.
Western Australia, two public hospitals, 544 patients. Median therapist time was 40 minutes for telehealth home visits against 160 minutes in person, with no significant difference in adverse events such as falls, delirium and pressure injuries; 20.6 percent of the telehealth group escalated to in-person visits, mostly for carer education and equipment. A retrospective comparison by the therapists who run the service; patients were not randomised.
An employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Northern Ireland. The trust, the first in Northern Ireland to pilot it, says AskSARA is an online self-assessment tool with advice written by occupational therapists that signposts people to suppliers so they can buy equipment privately without waiting for a formal assessment by an occupational therapist; if needs are more complex, the tool recommends a formal assessment, and people can still ask for one. A rule-based tool; no outcome data are given.
Small-scale trial in a real setting. Tells us the deployment conditions are being tested, not that they hold — so one pilot is never enough on its own; two independent ones are.
England. The guideline says do not offer robot-assisted arm training as part of an upper limb rehabilitation programme; the committee was not convinced that the clinical benefits of such devices outweighed those achieved by physiotherapy of similar intensity, and notes that only a few stroke units have access to them and that the recommendation should reduce or discourage their use.
Failure, rollback, regulation or cost is suppressing adoption. Can lower an assessment or widen its uncertainty.
United Kingdom, four centres, people with moderate or severe arm limitation after stroke. 770 participants were randomised to robot-assisted training, an enhanced therapy programme delivered by therapists, or usual care; the primary outcome was achieved by 44 percent with the robot, 50 percent with enhanced therapy and 42 percent with usual care, and the authors conclude the results do not support robot-assisted training as provided in routine practice. An independent trial of one robotic system.
A demo, benchmark or paper shows the task can be done. Updates what the technology can do — not what employers will do.
What this means for you#
If you are starting out, expect some home visits to happen by video and simple equipment requests to go through online self-assessment. Build what those do not cover: observing a person in their own home, carer training, complex equipment and therapy that rebuilds everyday skills.
Expect to triage between video, self-service and in-person work. Deciding when a person needs you in the room stays with you.
Your options#
Four directions, each with its real constraints and one thing you can test this week. Continuing as you are is a legitimate choice — it just has to be a chosen one.
Learn to run video home assessments well
A hospital service cut therapist time per home visit sharply by video without more falls, but one in five patients still needed an in-person visit.
Video does not suit everyone, especially where carer training or equipment fitting is needed.
Find out whether your service offers video home visits and how it decides who still needs an in-person visit.
Stay in hands-on rehabilitation
Robot arm training did no better than usual care in a large trial and England's guideline says not to offer it; the US projects strong growth for the job.
Rehabilitation roles can be physically demanding and depend on staffing in each service.
List which of your sessions last week needed you physically present and which could have been remote.
Move into complex equipment and housing adaptations
As simple equipment moves to online self-assessment, complex needs are still referred to occupational therapists for formal assessment.
Housing adaptation work often sits with local councils and needs knowledge of building and funding rules.
Ask who handles complex equipment and housing adaptations in your area and what training they needed.
Common questions#
Not on present evidence. Robot arm training did no better than usual care in a large trial and England's guideline says not to offer it, video home visits still need a therapist, and the US projects 15% growth for the job.
We do not answer that with a number of years. Watch whether online self-assessment spreads beyond simple equipment, and whether any rehabilitation technology beats therapy of similar intensity in a trial. Those tell you more than any date.
Not for arm rehabilitation after stroke, on the largest trial. In RATULS, robot-assisted training did not improve arm function compared with usual care, and England's guideline now says not to offer it.
For many patients, yes. In one Australian hospital service, video home visits used a quarter of the therapist time of in-person visits with no more falls, but 20.6% of patients still needed an in-person visit.
What these judgements rest on#
3 of 4 task judgements on this page are backed by a verified event and 1 are platform inference, each labelled where it appears. Behind them sit 3 technology dimensions, a reconstructed trajectory since language models reached the public, and 5 verified events.
See which technologies, how it got here, and the method →
Where it sits in the official classification: skills, knowledge, related jobs →
Other roles in the same function#
A company divides its work into functions before it divides it into jobs. These sit in Core delivery (industry-specific) alongside this one — a fact about org charts, not a judgement that they are similar or that they are changing in the same direction.
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