Clinical Reasoning

The cognitive and reflective process by which healthcare clinicians — particularly physical and occupational therapists — individualize care under patient and contextual uncertainty. Clinical reasoning blends analytic processes (hypothetico-deductive generation, pattern recognition, illness scripts) with non-analytic intuition, narrative understanding, and ethical judgment to tailor interventions to each patient's body, goals, and environment. In accessibility and rehabilitation technology design, clinical reasoning is increasingly treated as a design lens: systems must expose adjustable parameters that let clinicians parameterize tasks at the point of care rather than imposing fixed, pre-scripted logic.