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Mobili-T
Swallowing therapy for head and neck cancer often fails at home - not from lack of effort, but from lack of clear, trustworthy feedback.
Mobili-T is a digital rehabilitation platform that changes this by bringing swallowing therapy into patients’ daily lives through real-time biofeedback.
I led end-to-end product design from early research through clinical deployment, shaping a connected system across mobile, hardware, and clinician workflows.
Impact
Enabled real-time visibility for clinicians across 50+ healthcare organizations including Stanford, Harvard, Cleveland Clinic, and UCLA Health
Increased patient adherence and consistency for at-home therapy
Contributed to raising $4M+ in funding
3 patents in digital therapy systems
Core77 Design Awards - Research & Strategy + Community Choice
Named NACO Startup of the Year (2021)
Role & Scope
Role: Product Design Lead
Led 0→1 design of a connected therapy platform across mobile, hardware, and clinician tools - from early research through clinical deployment.
Defined product strategy and core experience principles
Designed patient and clinician workflows across mobile and web
Established onboarding and adherence models
Aligned product with engineering, clinical, and research teams
Resulted in adoption across 50+ healthcare organizations and clinical deployment at leading institutions.
The Problem
Swallowing therapy breaks down outside the clinic.
Patients lack clear feedback on whether they’re doing exercises correctly, and clinicians lose visibility into progress between sessions.
Traditional systems:
Are tied to specialized, clinic-based equipment
Not usable in everyday environments
Require supervision to be effective
Result
Low adherence, inconsistent practice, and limited clinical insight.
Mobili-T was an opportunity to rethink how therapy is delivered.
By combining a wearable sensor with a mobile platform, we aimed to:
Bring clinically validated therapy into everyday environments
Provide real-time biofeedback that patients can understand and act on
Enable clinicians to monitor progress remotely
The goal was not just to digitize therapy, but to create a system that supports consistent, real-world use.
Patients didn’t need motivation - they needed clarity
Swallowing therapy is physically and cognitively demanding. Early concepts focused on gamification - but testing revealed a different need.
Patients needed to understand:
What to do
Whether they were doing it correctly
How close they were to success
Decision: Remove gamification entirely
Why: It increased anxiety (failure felt punitive) and conflicted with clinical expectations
Impact: Improved trust, reduced friction, and supported consistent adherence
Represent Effort Honestly
Patients needed feedback they could trust.
We designed a system that reflects real effort in real time:
Daily calibration sets a personalized goal
Each attempt is measured against that goal
Outcomes are shown without judgment or exaggeration
This grounded progress in actual performance, improving consistency without adding cognitive or emotional friction.
We created a shared language between patients and clinicians
We introduced a simple visual system where each swallow is represented as a cube.
Colour = different exercise type (Regular, Effortful, Held)
Fill = outcome and completion related to calibrated goal
Sequences = cube formations progress over time as patient capabilities increase
This translated complex physiological data into something instantly understandable - while remaining clinically meaningful.
This reframed therapy from “win/lose” → “understand and improve.”
Each swallow is represented by a coloured cube, corresponding to different exercise types.
Each rep of a swallowing exercise has an outcome: goal reached, goal attempted and nothing detected.
A dotted goal line is generated during calibration from your muscles that day. This becomes the goal during exercise. Different exercises have different time or intensity goals.
Usability was paramount with considerations for dexterity, color blindness and language complexity.
The Regular swallow is like a warm-up - used to calibrate the goal for other exercises.
The Effortful swallow involves squeezing neck and throat muscles as hard as possible.
The Held swallow involves holding the larynx (Adam’s apple) at its highest point for 3-5 seconds during a swallow.
Decision: Use a unified visual system across patient and clinician tools
Why: Reduce interpretation gaps between home and clinic
Impact: Faster understanding, clearer communication, better decisions
Clinicians lost visibility between sessions → we rebuilt it with a real-time portal
At-home therapy introduced a critical gap: clinicians lost visibility into patient performance between sessions.
The Clinician Portal restores clinical visibility.
It enables:
Real-time tracking of adherence and progress
Pattern recognition across sessions
Remote adjustment of therapy plans
By sharing a visual language with the patient app, it creates a consistent, interpretable system across both sides of care.
This shifts MobilI-T from a tool into a connected care platform - supporting better decisions without increasing clinician burden.
Patients can see insights through in-app tracking.
Clinicians have access to both patient and clinician specific insights on their Clinician Portal.
Changes to the workout can be made in the Portal and patients, and clinical colleagues will be notified of alterations.
Decision: Centralize patient data into a real-time clinician dashboard
Why: Clinicians lacked visibility between sessions
Impact: Earlier intervention, more responsive care, reduced clinic dependency
Designed for Real-World Adoption
Deploying into clinical environments required more than a usable product—it required alignment across patients, clinicians, and administrators.
We designed onboarding as part of the system:
Structured training for clinicians and care teams
Clear documentation and protocols for setup and use
Live support to guide early adoption and integration into workflows
This ensured teams could confidently introduce Mobili-T into practice, without adding friction to already complex clinical environments.
We reduced cognitive load in a high-stress therapy experience
Patient onboarding required communicating precise anatomical placement and unfamiliar interactions.
We simplified:
Visual representations of the body
Instructions and language
Interaction flows
This ensured the system remained usable across varying patient conditions and abilities.
Decision: Design onboarding as a core part of the product system. Not a handoff after delivery.
Why: Clinical adoption depends on more than usability. Teams need clarity, trust, and support to integrate new tools into established workflows.
Impact: Faster onboarding across clinics, higher confidence and consistency in use, reduced friction for both clini
We extended the system beyond prescribed therapy → into live clinical use
Through clinician interviews and usability testing, clinicians emphasized the need to observe patients outside rigid exercise flows.
In response, we designed Core - a flexible biofeedback mode for in-clinic use with no predefined structure or tracking.
Core is a sandbox-style biofeedback interface that allows clinicians to live stream muscle activity from Mobili-T’s sensors.
Core enhances in-clinic utility and strengthens the transition to structured therapy at home.
Decision: Add a non-structured “Core” mode for clinicians
Why: Prescribed flows didn’t reflect real clinical interaction
Impact: Increased adoption and usefulness during live sessions
We didn’t design a therapy app - we changed how therapy works
Removed gamification to preserve clinical trust
Patients gain clarity and confidence at home
Designed feedback around real effort, not scores
Created a shared visual language across patient + clinician tools
Built clinician visibility through a real-time portal
Extended the system into live clinical use
Patients gain clarity and confidence at home
Real-World Impact
Mobili-T helped patients bring therapy into everyday life - making consistent progress outside the clinic possible.
“There is another device at the Cross Cancer Institute, but it’s about the size of a refrigerator, so you can’t take it home. I was able to take Mobili-T to my office and do my exercises while sitting at my desk. It’s amazing.”
“After three weeks I started to get better. I was able to have Christmas dinner—I had turkey and mashed potatoes because of Mobili-T.”
— Ted, Clinical Trial Participant
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