Developing Home Exercise Programs with HappyNeuron Pro
Creating HEPs with HappyNeuron Pro
Creating a home exercise program (HEP) is one of the most effective ways to help clients carry over therapy progress into their daily lives. As providers know, it takes more than a few appointments a week to truly reach goals. In rehabilitation, the real gains often happen between sessions. This is when clients practice consistently and have opportunities to apply what they’ve learned and integrate strategies into real-world routines and scenarios.
HappyNeuron Pro makes HEP planning simpler, more personalized, and easier to track both performance and progress. With its online library of interactive, science-informed cognitive exercises, clinicians can build structured programs that keep clients engaged while reinforcing targeted cognitive goals.
Why use HappyNeuron Pro?
When it comes to physical diagnoses, we generally understand what it means to exercise the body, but how do we wrap our minds around how to “exercise the brain”? This is a tricky concept when educating clients on how to perform cognitive exercises and how to practice them.
Traditional HEPs often rely on tangible worksheets or generalized activities. These can be helpful, but they sometimes fall short in engagement, personalization, and accountability.
HappyNeuron Pro addresses these challenges by:
- Allowing clinicians to tailor and label HEPs by creating what we call “Workouts” in our program. They can be made to target specific goals like attention or memory, diagnoses such as “Stroke” or “Traumatic Brain Injury”, or age such as “Older adults” or “Youth.”
- Setting exercise workouts for specific dates and times, so they are consistently training their brain throughout the week. For example: Tuesdays and Thursdays for 20 minutes.
- Tracking client performance and practice time for measurable progress
- Making exercises accessible at home on a computer or tablet
- Offering interactive, game-like activities that clients find motivating
To save time, clinicians can create and save pre-set programs for specific populations, such as:
- Older adults with mild cognitive impairment – focused on memory reinforcement
- Teens with ADHD – emphasizing attention and self-monitoring
- Stroke survivors – targeting both working memory and visual-spatial skills
These pre-set HEPs can be quickly assigned and modified, making it easy to balance efficiency with individualization. The HEPs may contain hand-picked lists of exercises that reflect key areas of focus for the client to better target their goals and specific cognitive deficits.
It is important to note that the Workouts in HappyNeuron Pro can be individualized and saved for a particular client in mind, therefore creating a personalized HEP. However, a workout can also be saved and used consistently for a variety of clients. For example, a workout can be saved as “Mild TBI” with a handful of exercises assigned within this workout folder. In the future, a clinician can then assign this folder to other users they believe can benefit. Other workout examples for HEPs include: “Visual Perceptual Skills,” “Stroke-Frontal lobe”, “Healthy Aging”, and “Attention skills”. Having these go-to pre-set workouts may be helpful depending on your patient population.
🚨Important to Remember:
- It is up to the clinicians to use their assessments, knowledge, and clinical judgment in developing HEPs.
- Clinicians must continue to monitor clients for progress and adjustments of exercises, levels, cueing, etc.
- HEPs should be adjusted as needed, based on specific client factors and skills.
- Each individual is unique, and their overall treatment will be as well.
How to create a HappyNeuron Pro HEP
To create an HEP within the Happy Neuron Pro program, you may find the following steps helpful:
- Log in to the Happy Neuron Platform and select the desired patient or client
- Select the “Workouts” tab at the top
- Select “on” for generating workouts
4. Under “Settings,” choose the days you’d like your client to complete their HEP, the time duration, the time their workout is available, and the number of repetitions for each exercise. Click Save!
5. Under “Scheduled Exercises,” choose “+ Add Exercises”. From there, you can add exercises from the left-hand side under “Enabled Exercises” by selecting the + sign.
6. Next, after all desired exercises are added, click “Save as Template” and then provide a name for this template, such as “Mild Dementia Exercises”, for example.
7. You can then save to “This User Only” to only use with this one client, or “All Users” to have the template accessible for other clients to be assigned to in the future.
8. When setting up future clients, you then will be able to choose to “Load a Template” for a client instead of having to individually select exercise options again. In this way, tailored clusters of exercises are grouped and ready to go, instead of individually crafting workouts each time. You can create multiple templates for multiple client types.
To explore more detailed explanations for creating workouts and navigating the Happy Neuron Pro online platform, please see our Training Manual here. This can also be found within our Resource Center on our platform.
Workout Recap:
Remember– you can create pre-set HEPs via HappyNeuron Pro’s “Workout” tab. You can add as many exercises as you like and label these templates as you please, based on diagnosis, population age, targeted deficit area, therapy groups, or any other criteria you prefer.
💡Tips:
When creating workouts, please keep the below information in mind.
- Under “User information” > “Settings” we do not recommend clicking “Allow User to Choose Varients,” as this allows users to change levels on their own, without successfully completing them.
- Under “User information” > “Settings”, you may choose to allow a client to access exercises outside of workouts. If you do not want clients to perform random exercises that are outside of their Plan of Care, we recommend turning this off. However, if you would like them to have additional practice, but do not mind the domains or exercises they choose, you can leave this on.
Scheduling and Tracking Progress
With HappyNeuron Pro, clinicians can:
- Set practice schedules (e.g., 20 minutes, 3x per week).
- Monitor client activity to see how often and how long they practice.
- Review detailed performance reports showing accuracy, progress over time, and areas needing more support.
Over time, you can use our reporting features to track your client’s progress via the “Results” tab. We suggest reviewing this data with clients over time to analyze areas of improvement and areas of deficit. This will help clue you in to adjustments required, such as increasing or decreasing the levels your client exercises are on, providing increased time, adjusting for environmental factors, providing verbal or visual cueing, etc.
Conclusion
Home exercise programs help build on the momentum of real-life sessions. With HappyNeuron Pro, clinicians can design cognitive-based HEPs that are structured, engaging, and easy to monitor. In this way, HappyNeuron Pro can easily provide extra support or supplementation to a client’s Plan of Care.
👉 Ready to see how HappyNeuron Pro can streamline your HEP planning? Schedule a demo or start a free trial today!
