Co-Designing Meaningful XR Telehealth: Our Research is Now Published

Curious how Immergo's platform came to be? Our co-design research is now published in Frontiers in Virtual Reality, and we're excited to share the story behind our approach to building XR telehealth for physical rehabilitation.

Research Driven from the Start

In collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine and University of Montana, we conducted one of the first stakeholder co-design workshops focused specifically on embodied telehealth for physical rehabilitation. We brought together 24 participants including clinicians, patients, designers, and engineers across five focus groups to evaluate our prototypes and explore what meaningful XR telehealth can look like.

The results were clear: 78% of participants were VR novices, yet they reported high comfort levels (4.50/5) and strong adoption interest from clinicians (4.14/5). Cross-stakeholder prioritization identified minimalist XR interface navigation and flexible clinical assessment capabilities as the highest-priority design requirements.

Six Design Principles for XR Telehealth We Build By

Their input shaped six design principles that now guide everything we build:

🏃 Embodied Guidance – Real-time feedback through full-body tracked avatars

📈 Progressive Complexity – Minimalist defaults that scale with user expertise

♿ Adaptive Accessibility – Multi-modal input options for diverse patient needs

🩺 Clinical Authenticity – Domain-specific assessments that clinicians trust

🎯 Biomechanical Precision – Accurate movement tracking for safety and efficacy

🎓 Contextual Onboarding – Building therapeutic competency through guided learning

Why Co-Design Matters

Building rehabilitation technology without the people who use it doesn't make sense to us. Too often, healthtech products are designed in isolation, only to fail when they reach real clinical environments. By engaging clinicians, patients, designers, and engineers from the earliest stages, we ensured that Immergo's platform addresses actual needs rather than assumed ones.

The stakeholders who participated in this research didn't just test our prototypes. They fundamentally shaped our product roadmap and design philosophy. Their feedback reinforced the importance of embodied agency, clinical authenticity through real-time full-body tracking, and scaling interaction complexity appropriately for different users.

Read the Full Publication

Want to dive deeper into our methodology and findings? The full article is now available open-access in Frontiers in Virtual Reality:

Co-designing meaningful extended reality for physical rehabilitation: a stakeholder-driven approach to embodied telehealth

The Team Behind the Research

This work was a true collaboration. Thank you to our co-authors and research partners: Aviv Elor, Adrian Parrales, Strauss Michael Bourdon, Maxim Kuznetsov, Kamryn Callwood, Alyssa Tu, Michael Powell, Ash Robbins, Matthew Bundle, Felicia Skelton, and Hilary Touchett.

Immergo is building the future of movement care through immersive telehealth. Learn more about our platform or get in touch to see how we're bringing research-driven XR rehabilitation to clinics and homes.