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Physiotherapist / rehabilitation therapist — tasks, one by one
The unit of analysis is the task, not the job title. Each one below carries its direction, whether the judgement rests on evidence or on platform inference, the reasoning, and what it does not establish.
Every task on this page#
Working out what is actually limiting them
Still human-led≈ Platform inferenceWatching someone move, testing what hurts and what does not, and finding the cause that is often somewhere other than the pain.
The input is a physical examination performed by hand plus watching a person move, and the diagnostic move is a hypothesis tested by touch — press here, resist this, now walk. Motion capture measures movement well and is genuinely useful; what it does not do is decide which movement to ask for, which is the assessment.
Hard to automate and easy to shorten: in session-limited systems the assessment is the part squeezed first, because it produces no treatment the payer recognises. A task can be eroded by a fee schedule without any technology touching it, and in this occupation that has already happened.
Treating with your hands
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backedMobilisation, manipulation, soft tissue work — and adjusting what you are doing based on what you feel while doing it.
This is closed-loop physical work on a person, where the control signal is tissue resistance felt through the hands and the patient's response moment to moment. Robotic rehabilitation devices exist and are used, but they deliver prescribed movement rather than responsive treatment — they are the exercise, not the assessment of it.
Durable and under pressure from a different direction: several systems are moving away from paying for hands-on treatment toward paying for exercise prescription, on evidence grounds rather than cost grounds. A task can be defended against automation and defunded by a guideline in the same decade.
Designing the programme
Being augmented✓ Evidence-backedChoosing the exercises, the load and the progression for this person's job, sport and patience.
Programme design from a diagnosis and a set of constraints is squarely what software does well, and app-delivered exercise programmes are widely deployed. The selection improves with a library; what does not transfer is knowing that this particular patient will not do three sessions a week and choosing the programme they will actually do.
A better programme that is not performed is worth nothing, and adherence is the binding constraint in this field rather than programme quality. Automating the design without addressing adherence optimises the half that was not the problem — which is the most common mistake made by products entering this market.
Keeping them doing it
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backedThe twelve weeks after the pain stops: noticing they have quietly stopped, finding out why, and changing something so they start again.
Adherence is the whole of outcome in rehabilitation and it is a relationship rather than an instruction. Apps send reminders and reminders are what people ignore; what changes behaviour here is a specific person expecting to see you and noticing, which is the same mechanism that makes a coach work.
This is the task with the strongest claim to being the profession's core value and the weakest claim on a payer's schedule: a check-in call is not a billable session in most systems. Where it is unfunded it happens in the therapist's own time, and where it stops happening the outcome falls for reasons no dataset attributes correctly.