Development of asmartphone app for neuromuscular facial training.

Abstract

Several studies have demonstrated asignificant benefit of neuromuscular facial training in the rehabilitation of patients with facial palsy. However, printed instructions for home training are often not of optimum quality and associated with low adherence to therapy. Professional guidance, e.g., by occupational therapists, is regarded as being of high quality, but is associated with ahigh cost burden, particularly in chronic forms of disease. The idea to develop asmartphone app for facial training arose from the above-described situation. The aim was to provide structured exercises for the mimic muscles in the sense of neuromuscular training with visual feedback via the front camera of the device. Anative app architecture in iOS was chosen to implement the graphical and content-related concept. In the Apple Xcode (Apple, Cupertino, CA, US) development environment, the app's code was written in the Swift programming language (Apple) and the graphical user interface was created. An app prototype was implemented that provides step-by-step instructions on selected mimic exercises via animated smileys. The duration and speed of the exercise can be varied within alimited range. In the development environment, the correct functionality of both physical and virtual devices was successfully tested. App-based facial training offers attractive opportunities to motivate patients for improved adherence to treatment, which could hypothetically lead to abetter outcome. Evaluation of this question is planned in aclinical trial after completion of the development.