The challenge of collaborative telerehabilitation: conception and evaluation of a telehealth system enhancement for home-therapy follow-up

摘要

Telerehabilitation aims to solve problems like equitable access to the rehabilitation and cost reduction byrnproviding rehabilitation services at a distance. The largest part of telerehabilitation systems implement arnreal-time one-to-one process involving patient and therapist. Even though they can be successfully exploitedrnin conditions such as post-traumatic recovery, in complex scenarios, this simple model should be replacedrnby a more structured collaborative one envisioning a multidisciplinary team.rnThis paper presents the design and evaluation of a patient-centric collaborative telerehabilitationrnframework aimed at supporting a multidisciplinary team in the follow-up of domiciliary patients. Thernproposed framework follows the experience of a clinical trial that exploited a novel telerehabilitation devicernnot conceived to support collaborative scenarios. Compared with the original system, the proposed extensionrnallows the hierarchical division of the responsibility within the medical team, promoting a collaborativernmanagement of the rehabilitation. Proactive and decisional behaviors, as well as consulting practices onrnshared data within the medical team, are fostered by the system. Semi-structured interviews have beenrnadministered to a panel of experts to evaluate the proposed approach. The collected feedback can be exploitedrnto finely tune the system in view of a new clinical trial including new functionalities.