EXPOSED
The work is overwhelmingly physical and in-person: setting up hydrotherapy and traction equipment, cleaning treatment areas, helping patients on and off tables, walking them between exercise stations, launder and stock. Almost none of that is text or screen work AI can touch, and no robot handles an unsteady post-surgical patient in a busy clinic. The exposure is on the other side: aides are unlicensed, make no clinical calls, and their clerical share — scheduling, insurance paperwork, note transcription for the PT — is exactly what AI absorbs first, which trims hours rather than eliminating the role.
Tasks largely resist digitisation. At 16 rather than 19, because guarding a patient during parallel-bar gait training, wrapping hot packs, and transferring someone from wheelchair to mat table cannot be done remotely — but the front-desk block of your shift (booking follow-ups, chasing authorizations, typing the PT's dictated notes into the EMR) is genuinely automatable, which is what keeps this off the ceiling.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments. 18 reflects that nearly every duty happens with hands on equipment or on a person in a room that changes hour to hour — spotting an unsteady total-knee patient, dragging ultrasound units and gait belts between bays, mopping up after whirlpool — and the only reason it isn't 20 is that the clinic floor is a controlled indoor space, not a roof or a roadside.
No licence, no signature requirement. 2 because no state licenses PT aides — you work under the PT's or PTA's direct supervision, your interventions are not separately billable under Medicare Part B, and if a patient falls during a transfer the claim lands on the supervising therapist and the clinic, not on a credential you hold.
Some relationship component. 8 because patients on a 12-visit plan of care see you more than anyone and will ask for the aide who sets the traction right and remembers their shoulder, but they were referred to the practice and the therapist, and when you leave the plan of care continues with whoever is on the floor that day.
Executes defined procedures on defined inputs. 4 because the PT's plan of care specifies the exercise, the reps, and the modality settings; your calls are narrow ones — pausing when a patient reports pain and reporting it up the chain — and you are not permitted to modify a program, progress a patient, or interpret a response as a clinical finding.
Psychiatric Aides EXPOSED
Has AI actually changed your work?