Otto Höbel is CTO and head of development with medica Medizintechnik. Shortly before market launch last year, he reported exclusively for THERAPIE on the latest developments in the market and gave a foretaste of what awaits customers with the new THERA-soft.

Mr Höbel, where do you see the challenges in developing the modern technologies used to treat movement disorders in therapy?

That’s very easy to describe. If you consider the clinical day-to-day world, there is relatively little spare time available to handle complicated technology. The day-to-day of therapy is characterised by time-limited therapy sequences. Within these sequences, the therapist needs to manage his or her work as effectively as possible with the patient and his or her individual goals. So our aim is to address the everyday problems in neurological rehabilitation and to offer solutions for this.


In the development phase, you have already been working closely with therapists and doctors. What insights have you gained as a result? →

We identify wishes. If we summarise the many hundreds of discussions with a wide range of therapists in recent years, in most cases we come up with similar kinds of wishes. As little as possible, as much as necessary!
In most cases, patients are not able to adopt a functional starting position in therapy without assistance or to retain this starting position over a longer period. This is where the patient needs support. Ideally, this support should be capable of being adapted to the patient’s capacity. Preparatory tasks should also only reduce valuable therapy time to a modest degree. This is the problem area that we are addressing with our developments, delivering genuine value-added for day-to-day treatment with our therapy devices and software solutions.

In that regard, the “practicality” you referred to earlier plays a big role. Experience has shown that high-tech solutions in particular often cannot be integrated into day-to-day therapy because they are simply too complicated. How do you tackle that?

I agree with you. And in recent years, more and more software-aided systems are coming to be used in rehabilitation, and these are not easy to operate. Imagine you have a device with ten different parameters, which need to set up individually depending on the patient. And the facility not only has one therapy device, but ten different ones. Ultimately, the therapist needs to know more than a hundred parameters, understand how these influence one another and also be able to operate everything. Which parameter leads to which goal? What needs to be set in order to walk that narrow line between over and under exerting a patient?
This is where we aim to come in with our solutions. Certainly, any software has a variety of parameters. But from our perspective, these need to remain out of sight in the therapist’s day-to-day work. We need to meet therapists at the point where they are in their day-to-day work – engaged in their core skill of providing patient therapy. That’s why, for example, when developing THERA-soft we worked with experts to put together a systematic set of therapy tasks. The tasks are matched to one another in a way that makes meaningful training possible, including shaping, without needing to know any of the technological parameters. We are moving in an entirely new direction with this software framework.

You have already mentioned the new THERA-soft. What can customers expect?


A fully-revised software, which even from the design perspective has nothing to do with its predecessor.

What innovations will there be?

I’d like to consider that mainly from the user side. There are two user groups who work with our software. Firstly, there are the therapists, and secondly we have the patients. We need to do what’s right for both groups. For the therapist, we have now managed to prepare the content in such a way that he or she can find, assign and select sensible tasks for the patient. And for the patient, there is great motivation and fun in carrying out the tasks using the new software. I am convinced that this will again clearly increase the success of the therapy.


What will most surprise and excite customers, in your opinion?

I am sure that will be the new layout we have chosen. That is sure to genuinely excite most customers. But we have also identified improvements in usability in quite a number of places. THERA-soft is now truly capable of being operated intuitively. There’s not a lot of deliberation needed, and I’m sure that the software will support therapists in their day-to-day work, without presenting them with massive technical challenges.

Thank you for the interview, Mr. Höbel.